Dawn of the Dead
by notmanos
Summary: The first assignment for Logan's strike team involves a bizarre mystery they'll have to solve if they want to survive.
1. Chapter 1

_Disclaimer: The character of Wolverine is owned by 20th Century Fox and Marvel Comics. No copyright infringement intended. The characters of Angel & Buffy the Vampire Slayer are owned by 20th Century Fox and Mutant Enemy. Bob and his crew are mine - don't make me hurt you._

_N.B.: Takes place shortly after "X3" and "New Blood"._

* * *

DAWN OF THE DEAD

* * *

1

He should have known something was up with these bozos when they appeared at the end of the hall dressed head to foot in some kind of body armor.

It was black and gleamed like an insect carapace, and Pyro wondered if it would look as good melted as he let go a flamethrower blast at them. With some help from that Indian kid, he was able to repair one of his lighter rigs, so all he had to do was raise his hand and unleash hell. "Eat that, assholes!"

The problem was, after several seconds of blasting them full on with waves of fire that were blistering the paint in the halls, these assholes were still coming forward. "Fireproof? Fucking fireproof armor? There's no such thing!" he shouted, scowling at the oncoming column of guards. They were moving slowly, but they were moving, and that bothered the hell out of him.

It bothered him even more when they raised their guns.

"I could use some help here!"

Just the thudding footsteps alone told him it was Piotr before he even walked by, his skin in full metal form and reflecting the fire as he walked straight into the flames and started tossing guards aside like rag dolls. Shots were fired, but they weren't gunshots; they were some kind of darts or something. They just bounced off Piotr though, and John was pretty sure they had this, until one of the guards jabbed Piotr in the side of the neck with a stick.

John thought it was just some big, tricked out truncheon, but it spit a huge blue spark, and tendrils of electricity snaked around Piotr like a living thing. Even though he was sure Piotr was immune to electricity in that form, it dropped him to his knees. Son of a bitch, a tricked out, mutant class taser? Now those did exist; Mystique had once mentioned to Magneto that the Organization had every kind of weapon you could name, invented solely to stop mutants across the spectrum. It was their ... um, some French term; sounded like raisins, but it couldn't be that.

Suddenly something ran past him, and he saw Kitty, in her intangible form, run into the fray. She crouched down, and must have made her hand briefly tangible, as she grabbed Piotr's arm as soon as the electric tendrils drained into the floor, and the guard's next jab went right through Piotr, who was no longer solid.

Kitty helped him to his feet, and they ran through the guards and through the wall, disappearing into the complex. "Now that's what I'm talking about!" John shouted, pouring on extra flames. Two away; hopefully they made it to the power core in time.

But there was still the problem of reaching the control center. As if in answer, he noticed a small, dark figure in his peripheral vision: Nariko, pressing her hands up against the wall. It was a small change at first, but it looked like the wall was melting under the palms of her hands. Wax? Clay? Frosting?

John felt a thump, and looked down to see that one of the darts had somehow survived the flames and hit him in the chest. "Motherfucker!" There was a yelp as Nariko was also hit by one.

The scene froze, and Logan asked, "Were you ever gonna join us?"

"Yeah Carrie," John snapped, calling back the flames and pulling the dummy dart out of his protective chest plate. "Coulda used you at any point."

The person shaped black hole named Zehra simply glared at them under heavy dark brows. She was standing against the far wall, behind him, and she blended in so well with the shadows that he forgot she was there. Well, never moving had also helped as well. "This isn't real. Who cares?"

Logan rubbed his forehead and pinched his eyes shut, like she was giving him a headache. Maybe she was; she was hurting John too, but much lower in his anatomy. "Darlin', it's a practice run. And lacking battle at the moment, you have to get ready for it. What part of that don't you understand?"

"I understand all of it, I just think it's retarded."

Kitty stuck her head in through the wall, and said, "Don't use that word."

"Sorry I offended you, Princess."

Oh snap. Girl fight!

Kitty came stomping through the wall, looking as angry as John had ever seen her (and he'd never seen her angry, so that was a first), but Logan inserted himself between them and Kitty stopped before she walked through him. Apparently Kitty had walked through Logan before and found it unpleasant, although John had no idea why. Kitty couldn't feel in that form, right?

"Ignore her, she's just tryin' to pick a fight."

Kitty frowned and crossed her arms over her chest, casting an evil look at Zehra over his shoulder but making no further move to disobey him. "Yeah, maybe, but because of her we failed in our objective again."

"No, you didn't; we did it without her."

"But we sucked," John exclaimed.

"Kitty and Piotr got through the front line; presumably, in your intangible form, you could have reached the power core. Before she got darted, Nariko made a hole in the wall through to the control room. Assuming I'm immune to the drugs in the darts, I would have made it through. Even if not, we still had Kitty and Piotr in."

"You would have made it through," a muffled voice said, and even though all the guards were currently frozen, one moved and took off his helmet. Her helmet. It was Doctor Khoury, wearing one of the guard's armor, and mixed in near the front. She'd had her gun out, but hadn't, in retrospect, been actually firing it. "I'd have heightened your healing factor, so even if you weren't immune to the drug, it wouldn't matter."

Even unflappable Logan looked mildly surprised. "When did you steal their armor?"

"I grabbed it off one of the guys you filleted while you were playing one man army out front," she said, and reached down into the armor and stuck her fingers through stab holes in the gut, which weren't visible due to the kind of armor it was. It didn't heal over, but it may as well have; it was so sleek and dark it was hard to see properly. "If you're going to insist on being a pacifist, then you find other ways to survive. Playing faceless henchman looked like my best bet."

Logan did something John had never seen him do: he grinned, an off kilter kind of grin that was slightly lopsided. It was creepy as all fuck - guys like Logan didn't look right smiling. They should be growling or snarling or glowering; but smiling? That was fucking weird. "I guess you get a gold star then. I didn't even see you on the field."

"Are we through?" Zehra asked impatiently. Supposedly she was telekinetic (or a "teek" as Mystique had called them, and she made it sound like a slur), but John was sorely tempted to give her a fireball right in the face. Nothing major, he didn't want to fry her, he just wanted to burn her caterpillar thick eyebrows off for being such a bitch.

"You are," Logan said menacingly, his grin collapsing like it hadn't been there at all. "We're done for today."

Before the illusion winked out and they were just in a big empty room again, John was able to see what Nariko had done to the wall: it was mud. So, you could cut through to the control center and get a quality facial mask at the same time. Leave it to a woman to multitask like that.

As they broke up, John wandering back to his room, he noticed Logan following Zehra out. Oh, to be a fly on the wall when he chewed her a new asshole.

Maybe next time they did this, they wouldn't have to deal with her.

* * *

Logan paced Zehra, letting her lead the way, but not so much that she wouldn't be aware she was being followed. But he said nothing, so it was up to her to get irritated and spin around before snapping, "What?! You gonna punish me for not participating in your reindeer games?"

"I'm tryin' to figure out if you're just lazy or scared. I do get a whiff of fear offa you."

Her brown eyes narrowed, and he picked up the slight ozone tinge that he could usually scent before she used her powers. He'd discussed it with Shaheen, and they'd come to the conclusion that her telekinesis was triggered by an excess of electricity building up in her body and brain, and that was pretty much what a seizure was as well: an electrical storm in the brain. This girl just made too much for her own body to handle. Logan wondered if she knew. "I'm not a coward."

"Okay, so you're just lazy?"

He heard a faint crackle, static electricity building in her shoulder length black hair. He was probably gonna get his ass kicked. "This is bullshit. It's fake. It's not real. Why waste our energy on scenarios that probably will never happen? It's stupid."

"Oh, so that's it. Yer afraid of triggering a seizure."

He was slammed back violently against the wall, enough so he dislodged plaster and all the wind was knocked out of him. He also couldn't move. He'd hit a bullseye there. "I am not afraid! Stop saying that!" Strands of her hair writhed with static electricity, in a way that made him think of Medusa.

"Sweetheart, let him go," Shaheen said, coming up the hallway. She was out of the borrowed armor now, dressed in jeans and a t-shirt, and her long doctor coat. "Although it is nice to see you can fight if you want to."

"It is, isn't it?" Logan agreed. The pressure against his chest let up, and Zehra turned away in disgust, stomping down the hall. She started cursing under her breath in Turkish, which she probably thought they didn't understand, but Logan got every word. He was waiting to spring on her that he actually spoke Turkish, but he was saving it for the right moment.

"I'd ask if you're okay, but that's silly," Shaheen said, and glanced at the wall behind him. "The very least she could have done was use her abilities to fix the wall."

"I know. I left a big dent."

"Metal's gonna do that. Also, impact. Should we get mad at her? If you were normal - I mean, not gifted with a metal skeleton - she'd have probably broken bones."

"I guess were gonna hafta wait 'til she puts Pyro through somethin' and see how hard she throws him. Everybody tosses me around like a cigarette butt."

"It's your charming personality."

"I'm a people person."

She smirked, but didn't quite commit to the laugh. The weird thing was, since they were the oldest on the team, they had become strange de facto parents to the rest. At least they had become friends of a sort. "So I've noticed."

"You wanna get a drink? I know this bar that starts happy hour right about now."

"Can't say I'm much of a drinker. Never really had a taste for it."

He shrugged. "That's okay. You can watch me drink."

She smiled wanly at his joke, and he thought she looked troubled as she glanced down at the floor, considering something. "Umm, I don't want to offend you, but you're not my type."

"I could be."

"No, you really couldn't." She sighed, shoulders sagging, and admitted, "I like redheads." She paused again briefly. "Female redheads."

He shrugged again. "So do I, so we got that in common."

She gave him a sidelong glance. "You're really unflappable, aren't you?"

"Got nothin' to be flapped about. Chuang-Tzu said 'All those who consider external things important are stupid within'."

"Wow, a warrior and a philosopher."

"Not really. I read that in a fortune cookie."

He finally got a laugh out of her, and damn it, it was about time. "I heard so many stories about you - most of them terrifying - but no one ever mentioned your sense of humor."

"Yeah, well, I think most people think I'm a humorless bastard. But when you have a life as absurd and fucked up as mine, you'd better have a sense of humor."

"I hear that."

"So, you at least play pool?"

She scoffed. "Logan, I'm a lesbian. Of course I play pool."

He wasn't sure he made the connection, but okay. "Bet I'll beat ya."

"Twenty bucks says I kick your metal ass."

"Yer on."

So she really wasn't that much of a pacifist after all.

* * *

Well, she was good, he had to give her that.

The first game was basically a tie - too damn close to call - so they were playing a tie breaker as he sipped a beer in between shots. She was on her third virgin margarita. It was a quiet bar, dark even in the afternoon, and people who wandered in here were generally local and career drinkers; they wanted quiet, so they didn't go out of their way to bug anyone and generally policed themselves. It helped that the bartenders were generally on the tough side; right now on duty was Joe, a war vet with a hook (well, a metallic grasper, but it had a kind of hook look) for a left hand and a torso so broad he probably needed to order special shirts. If someone looked like they were about to start trouble, he glared at them and they usually stopped.

Logan was trying to concentrate on the game - he had to; Shaheen was better than he expected, a real pool shark - but his mind kept wandering back to Zehra. She'd be of no use in the field if she was afraid to mix it up. She clearly thought she was ready for an actual battle, but unlike Pyro and Kitty and Piotr, she hadn't been in the field yet. Her abilities would be useful, but he supposed he was going to have to kick her off the team. The others had surprised him by gelling pretty well together; they were a formidable team. And while she wasn't a fan of fighting, Shaheen was a great second in command, mainly because she was so damn smart. (Did that really surprise him? She was a doctor - as a rule, they weren't complete dumbasses.) Storm really wasn't going to like getting Zehra back, but hey, the girl was a fucking brick wall. If she ever made any sort of effort, he'd have given her a shot, but she didn't want to do anything but sulk and pick fights with the others. He was surprised that Pyro hadn't set her head on fire yet; he was amazed at his sense of discipline. Maybe he was afraid she'd put him through the wall.

The cell phone in his pocket rang just as he was lining up his shot, and Logan knew right away it was trouble. Only Storm, Angel, and Bob had his number, and they never called to shoot the shit. He dug the phone out and flipped it open. "Yeah?"

"I think it's time to see what your team has," Storm said, without preamble. "I need you back here now."

"It's that bad?"

"It's bad."

"Terrific." He hung up and shoved the phone in his pocket, while Shaheen stood by, leaning on her pool cue like a cane.

"We got a job?" she asked.

"Looks like it."

"Damn it. I guess I'll have to kick your ass next time."

"You wish, sister." Logan wondered if he had time to leave Zehra out, or if he'd have to take the dead weight with him.

Knowing his luck, he already guessed the answer.


	2. Chapter 2

2

This was one of those awful moments where you had to decide what kind of a leader you were. Were you one who shared everything with your people, or told them only what they needed to know? Logan was sure he'd be the cool guy, the one who shared, but after Storm briefed him on the situation, he had to consider how the kids would take it. He wasn't worried about Shaheen, she was an adult, and Pyro had worked with Magneto, so fuck him, but Kitty and Piotr? Still had an air of naivety about them, and as for the dead weight of Zehra, she came off as super tough, which meant she was more naïve than Kitty and Piotr combined. Damn it.

By the time he called them all to one of the briefing room, he decided to tell them what they needed to know, but right now that was most of it. "Hey Pete, you familiar with an area called Sobolyad?"

Piotr, who must have come straight from the gym since he was wearing a blue tank top and grey sweatpants, cocked his head to the side like a curious parakeet. "Sounds Russian."

"It is. Why I'm asking."

He considered for a moment and shook his head. "I don't think so. Where's it close to?"

"From what I could tell, Yakutsk was the closest city."

Piotr's blue eyes bugged out slightly. "Yakutsk? Logan, that's in Siberia."

"I know."

"What's going on?" Kitty asked, looking between them. She was trying to pretend that she wasn't alarmed, but she was.

"Why are we talkin' about the ass end of Russia?" John asked, then added, "No offense, Piotr."

Piotr made a helpless gesture with his hands. "I don't care. It is the ass end of Russia."

"You know, I've heard of Yakutsk," Shaheen said. "In a British newspaper travel article. They called it the coldest place on Earth."

"It's not Antarctica," Logan replied. "I mean, it's fucking colder than any place where people live should be, but it ain't McMurdo Station."

Kitty gave him one of those remarkable looks of hers, one where she looked to be incredulous and slightly scolding at the same time. "Are you saying you've been to Antarctica?"

"Look, everybody just pay attention," he said, aware that this briefing was starting to get out of hand. They gathered around the briefing table with various looks of trepidation, save for Shaheen, who had that blasé/neutral expression that she almost always seemed to have, and Zehra, who stayed out of touching range of everybody, lurking in the shadows like she was eavesdropping on the party. The display table lit up, but right now it wasn't showing anything interesting. "Last night, our time, a friend of Xavier's who studies mutants over in Europe picked up what he characterized as an extreme surge of mutant energy in this area." He touched a holographic map of Russia, and it zeroed in on the area around Sobolyad, which was really a whole bunch of nothing. Not even military satellites had bothered to map the area, because it was part of the vast icy wasteland that made up that part of Northern Russia. There were thick stands of trees, sure, so it wasn't a barren steppe, but there still wasn't much to see. Not many people lived there, because, hell, would you if you had a choice to go somewhere where the rivers weren't frozen solid for a good chunk of the year? "He went to check it out, but the only message he was able to get out before his radio mysteriously died was that something was very wrong. A satellite pass over the area confirmed no life signs were picked up, even though he brought a team of nine people with him."

"Were they mutants?" Shaheen asked.

"He was, but only in the sense that he could pick up other mutants. Storm said the people he brought with him were just medical personnel and a couple of pilots."

"So somebody wiped them out?" John asked, skepticism seeping into his voice. "Somebody who satellites can't register as living?"

"Military satellites are kinda dumb," Logan told him. "If you know what you're doing, you can block or interfere with 'em quite easily."

Kitty threw up her hands in exasperation. "Why do you always say these kind of things like you've done them?"

"Could it be the government?" Piotr asked, meaning the Russian government.

"Or, um, those military people? Who were they, Organization?" Nariko asked hesitantly. Her English still wasn't perfect, but it was really good. She was needlessly anxious about it.

"The Organization never really worked with the Russians, mainly 'cause the Russians had their own program going and didn't like the competition. And that program generally doesn't run anywhere near Siberia; they generally operate in the Urals near Kazakhstan."

Kitty looked almost furious with impatience. "How the hell do you know that?"

"I'm not even sure where Kazakhstan is," John admitted.

"You're better off not knowing," Piotr told him, then glanced across the holographic display table at Logan. "What about scanning it with Cerebro?"

"Can't be done. When Tabitha tries, she gets a severe headache and Cerebro shuts down. She said it's almost like something's attacking, although she doesn't get a sense of intent behind it."

"It could be Russian military," Piotr said, in Russian. It was a message for Logan alone. "They always say they don't do these kinds of things, and they always do."

"That possibility is still on the table," Logan told him, also responding in Russian. "But frankly, judging from my past experience with them, this is way too subtle. The Russian and American military is alike in one fashion: both very in your face. They want to trample you down, they let you know they're comin'. Their cover ups are always quick and half-assed, as if daring anyone to dispute it."

"Hey," John interrupted sharply. "How 'bout letting us non-Russian speakers in on this conversation?"

"I was just asking about seeing my family," Piotr said, reverting to English. "If we're going to Russia, I don't see why we can't stop by. Afterwords."

"We'll have to see how it goes," he told him, surprised that Piotr had a cover story all ready to go. He wasn't sure anyone bought it, but it didn't matter. "We're gonna land just outside the target area of Sobolyad and search for survivors. That's our main mission. Secondary is locating the source of this energy. If we find survivors in need of help, we retrieve them and get out of there; secondary will be aborted. We clear on this?"

"If this person has wiped out everyone else, why do you think we stand a chance?" Zehra piped up, being her usual negative self.

Logan smirked at her. "We're tough bastards. I don't care who it is - worse comes to worst, they can get some of us, but they can't get all of us."

Or at least he hoped so. But he wasn't about to tell them the rest of it.

* * *

He made sure they were geared up for cold weather before they headed out, but Logan couldn't quite shake the feeling that this was a mistake. He wasn't sure they were ready. But Storm wouldn't let him go alone, and besides, he really did mean what he said: they couldn't get all of them. Just most.

In a way he hoped it was military, because those stupid assholes were always overconfident and underfunded. They thought machismo could be a bridge between whatever they were lacking when facing off with mutants, and besides that, they had never perfected anything to catch someone with Kitty's powers. It'd be like catching a ghost in a bottle. Of course, Logan knew there were ways to do that, but that involved magic, and no military on Earth put any credence into superstitious nonsense, which Logan had discovered the hard way wasn't actually nonsense at all. So maybe that gave them another kind of edge.

He had Piotr run the pre-flight check so he could sneak off and make a call. An unfamiliar voice answered. "Yeah?"

There was just a hint of a Swedish accent, which told him all he needed to know. "Matt, it's Logan. I need to talk to Marc."

He heard a groan and some soft noises before a sleepy voiced Marcus said, "Yo."

"What time zone are you in?"

"Fuck if I know. Now what's up?"

"I need you to do me a favor. If you don't hear from me in thirty two hours, I need you to high tail it to Sobolyad Siberia. Bring a rocket launcher and come to party."

"If I don't hear from you, I'll pack enough incendiary bombs to burn down Vladivostok in its entirety."

"That's overkill, but thanks."

"So why am I declaring war on Siberia?"

He gave him a very abbreviated version of events in Sobolyad, and told him what he hadn't told his team: that he had a bad feeling about this. "Well, it doesn't sound good," Marc said, scoffing faintly. "People drop off the face of the earth for no reason, and their last message is a cryptic warning. Sounds like a surprise birthday party to me. Save me a piece of cake. Hope it has some marzipan ducks on it; I love me some marzipan ducks."

"I'm gonna send you pictures of Shaheen, Nariko, and Zehra, so you can identify them." He didn't need pictures of Piotr, John, or Kitty; he already knew what they looked like. "If it's all gone to shit, get 'em clear."

Marc sighed heavily. "Is this where I ask what about you, and you say what about me, since you're bucking for your martyrdom badge? Although at this rate it's not so much a badge as a very large Stanley Cup sized trophy you'll have to build a shelf on your bike for."

"Do you even need me in this conversation?"

"Prob'ly not, but if I'm up, you're up."

"You're grumpy in the mornin'."

"Coming from the eternal ray of sunshine, I'll take that as a compliment."

In the background, he heard Matt complain, "Would you two just fuck and get it out of your system already?"

This made Marc chuckle. "He's trying to turn you gay, Logan."

"Ain't nothing gay about wanting to fuck your sweet ass," Logan replied, and this sent Marc off on a full throttle laughing jag, until it sounded like he was choking for breath. Logan held the phone aside and laughed himself.

When Marcus had regained his breath, he exclaimed, "You bastard, you've been saving that one, haven't you?"

"What, you're the only one who gets to make smart ass comments? I was due."

"Hey, I'll be the arbiter of that, not you." He yawned, then said, "Sobolyad. The clock's ticking. You contact me, or I'll hunt you down like the dirty dog you are."

"Thanks. I owe you one."

"You probably owe me about twelve by now, but who's counting?"

Logan had told Storm to give him forty hours. It wasn't that he didn't think Storm could handle it, because he knew she could; competency wasn't the issue. The issue was whether she could pull the trigger or not. If what was waiting for them in Sobolyad was so bad that they couldn't even save themselves, that suggested implementing a scorched earth policy was in order. Storm might do it, depending on the circumstances; Marc would simply do it. So he won the coin toss. Mutant abilities or not, it was always a bit difficult to argue with fragmentation grenades, napalm, and surface to surface missiles.

It was some comfort to think that, even if they failed, someone would be coming in to kick their asses.

The flight over was a little tense, as Logan figured it would be. He got to fly the jet, though, so he had the excuse of concentrating on that and ignoring everything else. Shaheen tried to calm everyone's jitters by mentioning that this was probably just a test run they engineered to see how everyone would do in the field. She knew that was a lie, but he gave her credit for trying.

It was a long flight, so by the time they reached Siberia, Kitty and John were both asleep. He wasn't sure about Zehra - did she ever sleep? She disappeared into the back hours before, and he wondered if she'd jumped out the back. He then wondered, briefly and horribly, if that would be so bad.

The location just proved that he was right about this being bad. It was early dawn here, the grey half-light giving everything a deceptively calm demeanor, the tail end of winter still gripping this place in an iron fist. It was not flat arctic expanses but rolling white hills, most very gentle in their slopes, a slight meandering you probably wouldn't even notice on the ground until you came to the copses of tall arctic pines, who stood out of the pristine snow like clutches of arrows that had fallen to the earth. The sky was a pearlescent grey and the ground was an unbroken swath of crystalline white between the gathered shadows of trees; it was gorgeous, a picture postcard of winter. And it would remain that way until you stepped out in it, and the icy wind threatened to rip the skin off your face and congeal your blood in your veins. Siberia wasn't all dreary; parts of it were unspoiled and beautiful. But it was all deadly; the difference was where the landscape warned you it was a death trap or seduced you into thinking it wasn't.

He set the jet down in a clearing between two shady stands of trees. The layer of frozen snow was so hard it was like landing on concrete. Looking out, he saw nothing but trees and snow, ice and sky; a peaceful picture of perfect contentment.

So right there was the first obvious sign something was wrong. Call him cynical, but as much as he liked peace, he didn't trust it. Logan couldn't help but wonder what was waiting for them out there in the wilderness, and why it bothered him so much.


	3. Chapter 3

3

Teenagers could complain about everything.

Although to be fair, John was no longer a teenager, he just whined like one. They suited up for the cold, but while John claimed all of it wasn't necessary since he had experienced Colorado winters and was a fire thrower anyways, Piotr pointed out that they were in Siberia, not Colorado, and he was an idiot if he actually thought throwing on a parka would be enough to protect him from the cold. John thought he was being "melodramatic". Logan told him to shut up and gear up. He knew what was good for him, so he did.

Logan led the way out. As soon as they stood in the open hatch, John said, "Holy motherfucking mother of god, we've walked into a meat locker."

"What did I tell you?" Piotr snapped.

Logan ignored them and walked down to the bottom of the ramp. He knew normal people sometimes said they could smell snow, but he was pretty sure they couldn't. Yes, cold had a smell, snow had a smell, but it was more dense than most people knew. Different kinds of snow had different kind of scents, although all of them cut through his sinuses like a knife. They all smelled like ice, and whatever trace elements of pollution ended up in the snow, and then there was another scent, one he couldn't describe but one he knew well: death. This was the smell of a chill so deep it was death. It was too bad others couldn't scent it.

There were rumblings of shock and complaint about the cold, as it seemed only Piotr was truly prepared for this depth of cold, but Logan ignored them and stepped out onto the snow. It was so solid under his feet it barely gave an iota, and considering how heavy he was with all the adamantium in his body, that was saying something.

There was still random bitching, but he ignored it as much as he could, concentrating on the scents. It was difficult. Scents just didn't linger; the wind was sharp and reasonably constant. After a moment, Pitor came up and stood beside him. "What part of Siberia did they not understand?"

"It's a shock for most people. They expect Nome in spring; they don't expect Arctic winter."

"Are you picking up anything?"

"Besides snow and wolf piss? Not really."

"Wolf piss?" He looked around, as if maybe he could pick them up. "How close are they?"

Logan shrugged. "Not very. It's old, gotta be a couple hours old; I can barely smell it. This is their territory, but they ain't here right now."

"That's good," he muttered, trying to peer out into the darkness of the trees.

Logan was surprised to catch a sour tinge of fear coming from Piotr, shocking him. "You afraid of wolves, man?"

"No, not wolves …" he shifted uncomfortably, then admitted, "I don't like dogs. I was attacked by a dog as a kid, and I've never really gotten over it."

"You got metal skin. Why worry about dogs? They can't bite through it."

"I know, but that's logical. And fear isn't exactly logical."

"True. Don't worry, it'll be our secret."

"Thanks."

John finally clomped over, half his face hidden by a ski mask. "Can I light something on fire?"

"No."

"What? C'mon man, why not? I'm freezin' my balls off!"

"Until we know what's going on and who we're facin', we need to hold off on the power displays until we need 'em."

"I need 'em now. I'm freezing my balls off."

"That's never killed anyone. Live with it."

"Goddamn it," John muttered, stomping away. "You want me to be a eunuch."

"Way to use a five dollar word, John," Shaheen said. As she joined them, she admitted, "I didn't even know he knew what that meant."

"I ain't an idiot," he grumbled.

"I'm sure the tests would say differently," Zehra snapped.

"Okay, that's enough from the peanut gallery," Logan said. "Everybody shut the hell up. I'm gonna scout ahead and see if I can detect a hint of what we're dealing with. I'll contact you over the comm when I want you to follow. Until I get back, Shaheen, you're in charge."

"Going alone isn't exactly teamwork," Zehra pointed out.

"No, but if I get killed, at least I have a chance of waking up again. Do you?" She didn't answer. No one answered. "That's what I thought."

"Well technically I do," Shaheen mentioned.

"Don't steal the advantage I got," he said, wandering off into the trees. Frankly, it would be nice to get away from everyone too. No offense to them - well, okay, some offense - but he could only take so much togetherness. People kind of cramped his style; he still wasn't used to them.

It was quiet in a way that the woods in Canada never were, not even up in the Yukon or the more remote spots of Alaska - this was the stillness of absolute nothingness. Not a bird twitched, not an insect trilled, not a bit of melting snow shattered a frozen leaf. This was emptiness; nothingness; death incarnate.

And it was wrong.

Even in Siberia, even in the crushing heart of winter, there was something. The slightest sound, not obvious to normal humans, something beyond the creak of snow or crack of settling ice. There was noise, just not obvious noise. But here it had all been clamped down, locked away in a hermetically sealed cell, and there was nothing right about that.

He walked between towering pines with roughened bark that could scrape your skin off if you were stupid enough to have any exposed, the branches heavy with snow but frozen, so if you jolted the thing just right the whole branch might come falling down on your head. There was no underbrush, no footprints in the snow. The only thing that hinted at life was the strong scent of wolf piss occasionally lingering near the base of a tree. He had not told Piotr he never had any trouble with wolves; for whatever reason, they seemed to get he was the alpha male and stepped aside, not wanting a fight with him, but it was too weird to mention. What the fuck was he, Tarzan? He just figured he smelled funny to them, Human but ... wrong. He'd never had any trouble with bears either, unless they were sick or something, and even then, he never had trouble for long. Animals seemed to get him better than humans, which was just a frightening thought. But then again, animals generally weren't out to kill him and couldn't lie, so they were better company all the way around.

At a certain point, the smell of wolf piss dissipated, basically disappearing, and that was another marker things were wrong. They had marked all these trees, so why would they stop now? Because there was something scary here, something they didn't want to bother with. The hill sloped gently upward, almost lost in the blinding whiteness, and he crested the rise carefully, tensed for action, extending his senses as far as they would go, even though the sensory input often climbed up to painful. (Yes, you could taste colors and feel smells, and it was as unpleasant as all fucking get out, which is why he'd never recommend it to anyone.) On the very top of the hill, he could see down into what was essentially a shallow depression, and in it were a cluster of rude houses: a village.

It could have been a nineteenth century village, the huts were that crude. Not made of space age materials, this was all handmade, and there was even a small storage hut made of hewn blocks of ice. A difficult task but a worthwhile one, as it was a rock hard material that would never melt around here. Roofs were uneven, doors were sans handles and probably locks. This would be a close knit group of people, for the simple reason that civilization was a hundred miles and fifty degrees away, and here you needed to band together if you wanted to survive.

But they hadn't survived. Logan knew from here the place was empty, and had been for a while. Again, there was the unnatural quiet, but there was also the fact that he couldn't smell any recent Human scents. Humans stank; you should be able to smell them a mile downwind. But there was nothing. Even the wolves had stayed away, and that was the most wrong thing of all.

Odd - it was like the wolves were trying to warn everyone.

He heard a crackle from his earpiece, and Piotr said, "Anything?"

"Nothin' good," Logan replied, deciding not to jump on his ass. He was supposed to contact them, but he was probably gone longer than he thought. "Looks like all the people here have disappeared."

"Disappeared? As in ..?"

"Gone, baby, gone. No sign of death, but no sign of life either. Follow my tracks, but proceed with caution. Something's really wrong here."

"Well, that's why we're here, isn't it?"

True enough.

Logan carefully headed down into the abandoned village, wondering if this was an abandoned Hammer horror movie set. That would explain a lot. Maybe there was a movie of theirs he hadn't seen, The Frozen Blood of Frankenstein or something. That would explain most everything.

The first house he came to he went inside. He just had to push the door open, as it hadn't been completely closed. It was dark inside, and bore the faint olfactory traces of pipe tobacco and beet soup, but very old; they were smells that had sunk into the interior wood, but hadn't been fresh for a very long time. A year? Maybe more or less; it was hard to say with any accuracy.

The table in the main room had been laid out. There was a candle in the middle of it, unlit, and two bowls of what was probably stew frozen solid; he picked them up and turned them upside down, figuring they'd make pretty lethal weapons if you threw them at someone. He'd never heard of anyone being decapitated by stew, but it would make a funny column note. The pepper shaker - there was no salt - seemed fine. So did the vodka, which he picked up and then put down. He was tempted to have a drink, but he could wait until later.

He found a rifle in the corner, wrapped up in hides and oilcloth - no shock there; out here, nearly everyone had a gun - and sniffed it, but it hadn't been fired in maybe a year. Hadn't been cleaned or oiled either, although it was in really good shape. Out here, a well tended rifle could be the difference between life and death. So whoever had been here - and there had been at least two, although they had been gone long enough that their scents were almost negligible - were natives to the area, or at least knew how to function as if they were.

There was no sign of a fight or intrusion; there was no sign of anything. People had been here, and then they were simply not. They had existed, and then, in the blink of an eye, they had stopped.

In Logan's mind, that was worse than anything. You had to give people a chance to fight back, a chance to do something, even if it was pointless. Just swatting them down like an insect offended him on a level he didn't understand. Maybe it was just a knee jerk extension of his hatred of bullies. He hated the strong picking on the weak; not like everyone else hated it, but homicidally. There was nothing worse than picking on someone who couldn't fight back, and it made him mad enough that he sometimes literally saw red about it. (And then came back to himself covered in blood, but that was another story.) Maybe it was because he thought there was no worse feeling than helplessness, and he had felt it enough that he would never admit it to anyone, maybe not even himself.

He knew the others had come because he could hear bitching outside. Oh, he was longing for a good ambush right about now.

"What's wrong with one little fireball?" John was saying.

"Kid, no means no," Shaheen said. "You don't think I'm not freezing my tits off?"

'Whoa," Kitty said.

"But we have to listen to the big boss man. You know, the scary claw guy, unless you'd like to deal with said scary claw guy when he's angry. Would you?"

"No."

"Okay then. Keep the fireball in your pants. Figuratively speaking."

"Literally would be fine with me," Zehra said.

"Enough," Logan snapped, walking out of the abandoned house.

"What is this place?" John asked, looking around. "An abandoned Disney project? Medieval Peasant Village - taste the oppression."

"Cute. No, it's a native village that's been abandoned."

"Abandoned?" Shaheen asked him. "Why?"

Logan shrugged. "Can't think of any good reason. I don't think they went willingly."

"No bodies?" John asked morbidly, looking around as if he hoped to spy an errant corpse he somehow missed.

"No nothing. No bodies, no blood, nothing disturbed, but they left all their stuff behind, and some of 'em were eating at the time; their dinners are still on the table."

Kitty shivered - it could have been a mock shiver, or a real one; hard to tell - and said, "Like the Mary Celeste?"

"Who's she?" John wondered.

"It was a ship," Piotr told him, a frown obvious in his voice. "It was found abandoned, with no sign of what happened to the crew."

"Ah." John said that like he honestly couldn't give a shit. "Well, this was productive. What now, chief?"

"There's no sign of the others?" Shaheen asked. "None of the people we're supposed to be looking for?"

Logan shook his head. "There's nothing indicating we're not the first visitors here. I think they never got this far."

"Or they disappeared without a trace too," Nariko commented. Did she have to bring that up? He was hoping they could overlook that possibility.

It was then that Logan heard the humming.

It was a deep thrum, very faint, but he was starting to feel it. "What the hell is that?"

They all looked around, but John was the first to ask, "What the hell is what?"

It was growing louder, though, and the vibrations beneath their feet was becoming noticeable. "Is this an earthquake?" Kitty asked, obviously alarmed. Even though she could go intangible, she was apparently afraid of earthquakes. Logan decided to make a mental note of it later.

"No, it's mechanical," Logan said, feeling the hairs stand up on his arms. Where the hell was it coming from? He was trying to focus his senses - it felt like it was coming from the ground, but it couldn't have been; he didn't hear it initially coming from the ground - track it, but it was almost impossible now. The sound had become amorphous, a tone spreading out across the landscape, echoing off the snow and the trees. He had a really horrible feeling about this now. Was this a trap? Was this abandoned village bait? But for what? And why?

"Mechanical?" John repeated. "As in a machine causing an earthquake?"

"No," he replied, still trying to focus, figure out the target. Belatedly, an odd thought occurred to him. "Zehra, is this psychic? Is there psychic energy behind this?"

She gave him a startled look, as if the idea was either insane or scary, but Logan had no idea what she would have said, because it was that very second that he was knocked out cold.


	4. Chapter 4

4

Logan clawed his way back to consciousness, fighting against something he couldn't see, only feel. He jerked awake, slumped in the corner of an empty room that was gunmetal grey, and smelled of nothing but purifying ozone, all walls and no doors. It was cold, but not Siberia cold.

"You never really thought you actually killed me, did you?" A familiar voice said, deep inside his head. He felt a chill run up and down his spine, completing a circuit, ending up curdling somewhere near his stomach. "Oh god no," he croaked, hoping it wasn't true, and yet kind of hoping it was true as well.

But didn't he know? On some level, when he felt that sudden chill of a mind touching his own, he felt tendrils of telepathy unfurling in his mind like dark ribbons. It wasn't good. It was someone with a grudge, someone who knew they'd face resistance and had to take him out so fast he couldn't mount even unconscious defenses.

"Yes, Logan, it's me," Jean said, and appeared before him, wearing a fiery red outfit that almost matched her fiery red hair. That seemed a bit tacky, although it looked good on her. She stood in the center of the empty room, far enough away from him that she'd have a chance to get clear if he lunged. If she didn't know it telepathically, if she didn't use her telekinesis to embed him in the wall first. "You gave it the best shot that anyone ever could, if it's any consolation. Your bravery - or is it insanity? How do you tell? - is always breathtaking. If you didn't have a built in death wish, I bet you'd be a coward."

"Let the kids go," he muttered, dry washing his face. He wasn't sure he could look her in the eye. His stomach was knotting, and it felt like it was crawling up his esophagus and strangling him from the inside out. "Fair play to keep me, but they're students, Jeannie. They got nothing to do with this."

She cocked her head to the side and studied him for a moment, like he had just grown a spare head out of his back. "Two ploys at once: martyr gambit, and guilt. The kids will alert the others, won't they? And you aren't expecting me to believe you're giving up without a fight, are you Logan? You'd fight a shadow. Raging against dying light is all you know."

That was a very poetic way to put it. Also, true. But he sank back into the corner and finally looked up at her, unable and unwilling to keep the tears from his eyes. His eyes felt like they were burning, that looking at her was like staring at the sun. "I don't want to kill you again," he told her, his voice a strangled whisper. "Do whatever you want to me, I don't care, I deserve it, just let the kids go." He felt oddly broken, like he was a statue that had just been thrown down on a marble floor, and he didn't even have the strength in his legs to stand up. He didn't want to fight her at all. He thought it would be a karmic balance if she killed him, a righting of at least one of his million wrongs.

Her reaction was subtle but surprising. She stared at him, stared through him, her mind like a white hot spotlight burning his, checking for veracity, and he didn't fight. As much as he had something in him that reflexively fought back against mental intrusion, there was another part of his mind that rolled over like a friendly dog wanting its belly scratched. He had been such a frequent victim of telepathic rape that part of him didn't even want to fight it, figuring it'd be less painful and quicker if he just let them do what they wanted. They probably would anyways.

Her eyes had an oddly flat look, almost doll's eyes, hard glass all the way through. He saw nothing of the old Jeannie in them. Her head slowly righted itself, but her expression never changed. "Holy shit. You're telling the truth."

"I killed you once. I'm done. I'm so sorry, Jeannie. Christ -" he considered not saying it, but she was a telepath, and chances were she already heard it in his mind anyways. " - I loved you. I'm sorry it all happened. If I could rewrite the past, I would."

Now her look hardened, setting like concrete. "You're a killer, Logan. You destroy everything you touch, and everyone you love."

"Yeah, well, then we're perfect for each other, 'cause you did too." He didn't say it with any rancor; he was simply pointing out a fact. She'd killed Scott, she killed Xavier (in a manner of speaking), and then she went on to kill people she hardly knew or didn't even know. Their trajectories were opposite, but still parallel: he started out that way and ended here. She started out the opposite way, and ended there.

Her head jerked back as if he'd thrown a punch at her, eyes widening in shock at his temerity. "You compare me to you, you mad dog?"

"We're both batshit. I had to come out of it, and you crawled back to it, but it's our home. I can try and help you, you can kill me, I can try and help you but you can kill me anyways, it's your call, but I can't do this again. I'm not the Professor, I'm not them. I'll do what I hafta to help you, fuck everybody else. I'll protect you from them. Just say the word."

Shock bloomed into horror, and she actually took a step back. "What - what the hell is this?"

He felt the metal floor. It was oddly smooth and almost slick; it was unlike any metal he'd ever felt before. What the hell was it? "This is a mindscape, right? No secrets here."

"This isn't what you are. You're a killer!"

"I'm a killer, Jeannie, but I never wanted to be one. I just wanted to left in peace. You know that; you looked into my mind, and almost convinced me I wasn't an animal. This is me, the me you always wanted to see. The me before my life became an unending series of nightmares. This is the actual Logan. Weird, isn't it? Even I don't recognize him whenever he crops up. Luckily, it's not that often."

She looked appalled and slightly angry, and that was kind of puzzling, but he was too emotionally distraught to think about it. "You bastard. Fight!"

He felt something like a machete cleave his face; his skin split in a deep horizontal line across his face, cutting his nose almost completely in half, but even as the blood started running down his throat, the healing had begun. He wiped tears and blood off his face, and said, "I'm not gonna fight ya, darlin'. You wanna kill me, go ahead, but you're gonna hafta do it in cold blood."

Her eyes were bright with fury. "How dare you!" She then winked out of existence, disappearing as quickly as she had arrived.

That was okay with him. He curled up into a ball, resting his head on his bent knees, and felt his face healing. He was just waiting for the emotional injuries to heal too.

He knew that would be a long time coming.

* * *

When John woke up in a little metal box of a room, his thoughts immediately traveled to his igniter. He looked at his wrist, and was disappointed but not all that surprised to see it was gone. Damn it! His back up Zippo was gone too.

But his desperation book of matches was still hidden in his sock. Thank god. It was kind of a gyp to have a power that was useless unless certain conditions were met - in his case, the presence of fire - but what could he do about it? Just plan to always or almost always have fire with him if at all possible.

Of course, fire wouldn't help now. The room looked to be a perfect metal square, fluorescents in the ceiling providing light, but it was otherwise devoid of everything, and if there was a door, he didn't see it. There was nothing to burn; he doubted he could get a fire going so hot he could melt it. "So what's the deal, huh?" he asked, taking off his gloves and feeling the wall. Mystique, the queen of all tricky bitches, had once told him that some places used holography and other things to trick people into thinking they were trapped in something more sophisticated than they were; she said your hands couldn't lie, whereas your eyes could. It sounded funky, but since she was so good at escaping, he had to believe she knew what she was talking about.

Somebody did this, though. The problem was, who had captured them? Obviously mutants were involved. Maybe the Russian equivalent of the X-Men? Maybe they thought they were bad guys.

"What are you doing?" A familiar female voice asked.

He turned to see, in the middle of the room, Tasha. That was uber-weird, because he hadn't seen her since the assault on Alcatraz. They weren't boyfriend and girlfriend; they just hooked up a couple of times, no big deal. She was called Bullseye because she had inhuman accuracy (she could throw a marble and knock a construction worker off the twentieth floor of a building) as well as inhuman reflexes. There wasn't a basket she couldn't make or a bullet she couldn't catch. Magneto had given her something to hit Logan with, something to keep him "preoccupied" while the rest of them went after that kid, but something must have happened as she hadn't made it, at least not to his knowledge. Had Logan killed her? John had told her to throw it from a distance, to not get close to him 'cause he'd fucking kill her, but she insisted she wasn't scared of him, making her pretty damn dumb. Maybe she never got that far; the fight was pure chaos, and energy was being slung around like no one's business. Maybe she got baked by an errant shot before she even got close, or maybe she got hit by a flying body. He didn't know if she survived the assault or not, but if she hadn't started running before Jean went nuts, she wouldn't have. Only Logan walked away from that. "Wow, hey, you hitched your wagons to these losers? Good to know you made it out. So who are these assholes and why did they lock me in a footlocker?"

She gave him a funny look, like he suddenly stopped speaking English or something. She had that good looking but exotic mixed race thing going on her; her skin was a kind of pale off bronze, her hair Japanese black, her eyes so brown you could've called them black and split the difference. He had no idea what her ethnic background was at all - at a guess? Hispanic, with either some white or black thrown in, or both - and she had never volunteered it. He didn't even know her last name. He just knew she was originally from Tucson. "You think I'm alive?"

He scoffed, and turned back to the wall. "Whatever, hon. You gonna help me get outta here or not?"

"I'm dead, John. So are you."

He looked over his shoulder at her. "No, I'm not. I have a pulse, I'm breathin', and you're talking, so I'm betting you're alive too. But whatever. Does this mean you're not gonna help me get out of here?"

"There's no way out. We're stuck here."

He sighed wearily. "And where's here?"

"Hell."

"No, see, I was just there a coupla weeks ago, and it was much more interesting than this place. So cut the shit, huh? Why are you here?"

"She sent me here."

"She? She who?"

"Jean."

He stared at her, not sure he heard her right. "Jean? As in "telekinetic freak out, I'm gonna kill goddamn everyone" Jean? Crazy as a shithouse rat Jean?"

"Do you know any others?"

Was this a game? What was this? He shook his head, not hiding his annoyance. "She's dead. Logan killed her. Like I thought he killed you."

"I got hit with a lightning bolt. And Logan only killed the body of Jean."

"And without your body, what d'ya got? A year's supply of Turtle Wax? This is total bullshit. Although I'm sorry Storm tagged ya. That's gotta suck."

She was still staring at him, and he suddenly realized how odd it was. Was she even blinking? He wasn't sure. There was something kinda zombie like about here, something about her total stillness that seemed off somehow. She was still wearing the last outfit he'd ever seen her in: jeans, black leather jacket, Mustang t-shirt. It didn't even look the slightest bit crispy, but if she'd been given a lightning enema, you'd think it would. "You don't get it. What did Magneto say about telepaths?"

He threw up his hands in surrender. So far, he hadn't felt a single goddamn thing on the wall. "Don't trust 'em. But you know he had that mad on for the Professor. Did you ever get the feeling that the thing between those guys was kinda weird? Like they were more ex-husbands than ex-friends? It seemed too personal to just be two drinking buddies who wanted to kill each other. Kinda gave me the creeps thinking about it."

"Some telepaths don't need a body."

He stared back at her, trying to match her non-blinking stare. His eyes started to burn a bit. "What are you saying? You're saying Jean's still alive? The Professor? Who?"

"Yes."

"Yes isn't an answer! Who is alive?"

"None of us here."

He closed his eyes and attempted to count to ten to avoid getting angry, but fuck it - he got to five and gave the hell up. "What the fuck are you talking about?!" he roared. "You're not making any fucking sense! I'm sorry if the lightning bolt scrambled your brains, but try and think about what you're saying before you say it, okay?"

She met him with her depthless, vacant stare, and John realized she was seriously creeping him out now. When he'd gotten up he moved the matchbook from his sock to his sleeve, and he dropped it down into the palm of his hand, the rectangular cardboard kind of comforting as he slid the cover aside and felt the matches in his palm. He wasn't going to light up if he didn't have to, he really didn't want to have to bake Tasha, but he wasn't a hundred percent convinced this was Tasha. She usually was a bit more feisty than this; she was a bad guy, not a drone.

Wait - was this even her? Was someone making him see her? Why were they doing such a piss poor job of it? The last thing Logan had said was something about that weird noise maybe being psychic energy. Not that that made any sense, but he supposed it was better than nothing. "Tash, is it even you?"

"I didn't survive the fight." She said it flatly, almost like a robot.

"You keep saying that." Suddenly he got a really bad feeling about all of this. "If you aren't alive, how am I talking to you?"

"She kept some of us with her; I don't know why. Maybe she didn't want to be alone."

"Kept? What do you mean kept? How?"

She shrugged, and he realized that was the first time she actually moved. "I think we're like pets, or maybe toys. Something she could play with, keep herself busy with. So were those people."

"What people? Wait - do you mean those people missing from the village? Jean took them? That doesn't make sense."

"She's crazy. Nothing she does makes sense. But she said if we waited long enough, you would come."

He swallowed hard. "The X-Men?" Oh god, he'd picked a horrible time to switch sides.

"Logan. She wants Logan."

Not a real shock. "She's gonna kill him?"

"Killing's too nice. She has something else in mind."

"What?" Oh, he was so glad he wasn't Logan right now.

"I don't know. I only know she thinks you shouldn't be here; she thinks you're wrong."

"What does that mean?" But in between blinks of his eyes, she was gone. He was once again alone in the empty metal room. "What does that mean?!" he shouted to the ceiling. There was no reply, but he didn't really expect one either.

If this was Jean, they were so fucked it was unbelievable.


	5. Chapter 5

5

When Nariko found herself back at her father's sushi shack, she knew something was wrong.

Someone wanted to order, they were gesturing towards her, but she sat on an empty stool beside the counter and tried to think - where was she last? It wasn't here; she knew for a fact that she had been away from home for a long time. She hadn't been in Japan since she left home.

Which had been when? For some reason she couldn't remember. Her head hurt a little, in a strange kind of way. She felt like she should know the feeling, what it meant, but right now her head felt like it was filled with fog. "Kyoko, what are you doing?" her father shouted from the kitchen. At the shack she used her middle name; it seemed less humiliating, although not by much.

She looked towards the door, wondering if this was the day that Wolverine and Cyclops had walked into the shack. When she first saw them, she was sure they looked familiar but couldn't place them; the fact that Wolverine spoke fluent Japanese (and with a slight Tokyo accent! He must have lived in the city at some point …) threw her even more. It wasn't her best day anyways. Only in retrospect did she realize those guys she'd seen on YouTube, the mutants, were in fact here to take her away. It was like a dream.

She'd never told Logan that he had scared her; that she had seen web footage of him slicing through people and it shook her to the core. That was a good guy? He was like a character in an American slasher film. She wondered if maybe he was half werewolf or something.

Which was why it was almost hilarious that she found him to be, on first (unknown) meeting, to be so kind. When he swore they were on the level, not perverts or mobster assholes, she believed him. He said they wouldn't hurt her, and she believed him. She didn't, as a rule, believe anyone, not since her father started getting into trouble with gangsters. But as rough and gaijin as he looked, she got the sense that he was being honest - he couldn't hurt her, even if he wanted to. She knew that to be true now. Oh, he was still fucking scary, his anger remained one of the most frightening things you could witness, but she felt safer with him than her own father. Maybe because if the Yakuza ever did decide to come after her again to settle a debt, they'd be going back to Tokyo in a series of small cardboard boxes. There was something to be said for having a slasher film guy on your side. She never told him, but she kind of thought of Logan as her big brother, the sibling she never had.

It was a shame about Scott. Sure, he seemed uptight, but not a bad guy. He even attempted to learn some Japanese words. His pronunciation was hit and miss, but at least he tried. It might not be bad to see him again, especially since his death was so sudden and so senseless.

But she sat there, and the only thing that changed was the irritation of the customers. No one was coming through that door except the usual cheap salary men looking for a quick lunch. Damn it, this didn't make sense.

Her head was aching more and more. This was key. The harder she thought, the more it hurt. There was no way that was a coincidence.

And there was no way she was going to be a waitress at her dad's damn sushi shack ever again.

* * *

Shaheen got up from her lab table, stretched, and rubbed her eyes. Back at the mansion again? Yep, back at the mansion.

She walked out of the student medical lab and headed down the empty hall, sunlight bleeding through the skylights making the cherry wood glow. It was very nice; quiet even.

"Okay, so what's the deal here?" she asked, as she headed to the kitchen. It was times like this she wished she drank. "I know you're a telepath and this is some kind of illusion or something. I know mainly because I'm still unseasonably cold. Forgot about that part, didn't you? The realities aren't quite meshing up. Sloppy."

She kind of expected something to happen due to her insolence, some kind of punishment, but it didn't happen. She reached the kitchen without incident, and busied herself getting a bowl and a box of Corn Flakes down from the cupboard. "Okay, here's what's going to happen: I'm going to bore you into submission. First, I'm going to have breakfast, and then I'm going to alphabetize my CD collection. If you're still hanging in there, I'm going to do my laundry, and then go watch the fifteen hour version of Berlin-Alexanderplatz until I fall asleep. I can bore the shit out of you. Just try me."

She poured a bowl of Corn Flakes, and retrieved the rice milk from the fridge. Did the telepath think she was joking? She wasn't.

Boredom was the only weapon she had against a mind reader, and goddamn it, she was going to use it.

* * *

Zehra woke up in the snow, and sat up, incredibly pissed. "What the fuck -" she began, then looked around.

She was alone.

She got to her feet, looking around at the empty shacks that made up this frozen, abandoned town, and shouted, "Hey, did you leave me behind?! Fuckheads!"

This got no response, but she couldn't say she was surprised. They had left her behind, hadn't they? It figured. She knew she couldn't trust them. You couldn't trust anyone, not really. Especially when American teenagers were involved.

She wasn't naïve or new to Western culture - she might have been Turkish, but she was raised in France. And she'd never met a larger group of shallow, self-obsessed idiots. She had thought they were bad in Lyon! Nothing like the American kids. Newsflash: she didn't give a fuck about Britney Spears. Was it possible to move on now? Apparently not. Apparently that also made her a snob. Whatever.

She looked around for footprints, any sign of what direction they may have left in - or come in, for that matter - but there were none. The snow was undisturbed, pristine; even when she walked in a circle, she left no prints. Was the snow's crust that hard? You'd think Logan would have broken it, but obviously not. Shit! This village looked pretty much the same from all angles; she couldn't tell which hill they'd come down. She could just randomly pick a direction, but she didn't want to be lost in Siberia. Fucking Siberia. The only thing she knew about it was that there was this Russian book she had to read in school that was set here, and that was it. Boring book; too much fucking whining.

"Hey!" Her voice echoed off the shacks and the hills, came back to her weak and pathetic. She got so angry that she ripped a branch off a tree, using her powers in a way that was remarkably casual; she didn't even need to focus at all.

In fact, they never really understood that about her. They thought to be a telekinetic was to focus on things. Maybe it was that way for some, but never for her; sometimes it seemed like her powers worked independent of her, and she needed to focus to rein them in, to keep them from doing something she didn't want. (Or didn't _really _want; it seemed to be manifesting her subconscious sometimes, which she really didn't like.) It got worse when her emotional state wasn't the best.

Like now. After breaking off the branch, she threw it into the nearest shack, and with just the slightest bit of mental pressure the entire thing collapsed like it was a gingerbread house. The snow began to crack, widening fissures that appeared to be snaking off towards the horizon, her control slipping as she tried to remember what was said before everyone else disappeared. Something about a psychic, right?

She really didn't know about that. She didn't pick up psychic energy. She only broke shit.

Like she was breaking shit now. The shacks started to tear apart, an invisible hurricane of machetes tearing them down to their foundations, and even she could feel the force like a warm wind as it went past her, from her. Snow, ice, and fragile branches rained down from the trees, and the little building made of ice fractured, exploding into dust. She knew she was using too much, exerting herself, but it seemed impossible to pull back.

She closed her eyes and concentrated, grabbing her head (as if that would help), and yelled, "Stop! Stop it!" But she could hear the cracking and crumbling going on around her, beside her and beneath her, the ground shaking like it wanted her gone, and it wasn't stopping. She was a train rolling downhill, with no brakes and nothing but speed. She was an avalanche, a tsunami, a hurricane; there was no stopping, only petering out. "Stop!"

When the darkness - the only precursor to a seizure she ever had - slammed down, she was almost kind of relieved.

* * *

Piotr woke up strapped down to a table in a small, empty metal room, and knew one of his worst fears had just been realized: it was the Russian government. They had some kind of mutation experiment lab set up here, and now they were caught in it.

From how cold he was, he knew he had reverted back to his flesh form. He tried to will the change back to metal, but nothing happened. He tried to sit up, move his arms, but he was effectively strapped down from high on his chest all the way down to his ankles. "Hey, what have you done to me?! Let me out!" Even as he shouted it, he wondered why he bothered - had that ever worked? Had anyone ever held captive against their will simply shouted, "Let me go!" and had it happen? Stupid.

He had left Russia because of these people. He'd heard that the government was hunting for mutants. He originally heard they were imprisoning them, killing them, but the truth was actually worse: they were using them as weapons. It was essentially Weapon X, but went by another name. He'd heard that the reason the Russian invasion of Afghanistan went to shit was because a "Western" mutant military team had decimated the Russian one, and all over some other conflict that had nothing to do with the invasion. (Weapon X? Piotr had meant to ask Logan if he was ever in Afghanistan killing Russian mutants, but then he heard about Logan's amnesia and knew it was pointless. But he bet it was Weapon X, what other mutant military team was there, and if so, that meant Logan had been there. It wouldn't have surprised him. And he'd have been rooting for him, actually, as he never really saw the point of invading people and taking anything by force.)

Piotr kept his mutation quiet, the only people in his family who knew knew purely by accident - but he knew his days were numbered when his Uncle Boris found out somehow. Boris was a drunk and a black marketeer who would have sold his own daughter if he thought he could get a good price for her. Selling a nephew would be no skin off his nose. Xavier probably showed up in his life at just the right time.

But now here he was, back with them. He could only hope that they still weren't prepared to deal with Logan. Or at least Zehra - could anybody deal with Zehra? She couldn't seem to even deal with herself, so the answer was most likely no.

He tested his restrains, which felt like some kind of slick steel. Almost his skin, actually, but not. He assumed they'd strengthened them so even if he got his powers back (how were they blocking his powers?) he couldn't muscle out of them, but what about slip out of them? They were prepared for brute force, but maybe not evasion. He had a little room to move around his shoulders, but how much good that was going to do was hard to determine. If he could turn his feet enough, maybe he could push up, get out from under. That might work. Of course, he might snap his own ankle trying it. But he had to do something. He could just wait here for them to … well, do whatever they were going to do to him. It couldn't be good.

But just as he was trying to figure out how he could contort that much, the lights flickered, and there was this deep, sick groaning noise, like metal somewhere sagging under weight it was never meant to hold. "What's that noise?" he asked, hoping for an answer.

There was none. The lights died, and the entire ceiling caved in.


	6. Chapter 6

6

Kitty found herself in her room at the mansion, not one hundred percent sure where she was supposed to be. But it wasn't here, that was for sure.

She turned off her stereo, which was mostly just broadcasting static anyways, and tried to think. She was ... damn it, wasn't she off on assignment somewhere? She was pretty sure she was. She'd gone out on a mission with ... Logan. Yes! And they went to ...

"Is there a problem, Kitty?" Jean asked.

Kitty turned to see Doctor Grey standing in the doorway, and her stomach did a bit of a flop. Wasn't she dead? "Umm, huh?"

"You're late for class."

"I am?" She glanced at the digital clock on her dresser, and saw it was almost one. Making her late for science lab. "Oh crap! I forgot the time."

"I can tell." She gave her a faint, indulgent smile, like she expected this kind of behavior and never found it any less amusing. "Why don't you -" She stopped and looked away as a noise echoed through the mansion. It was a strange noise, kind of metallic, and Kitty had time to ask, "What was that?" before it reached a crescendo.

It sounded like something collapsed. A crane or something. "What -" But Jean was no longer in the doorway.

Kitty went to the doorway and looked down the hall, only to see the weirdest thing. The polished wood corridors of the mansion seemed to flicker, like a dying lightbulb, and when the shadows swelled, she could see silver metal walls. What was this?

What the hell was going on?

* * *

Logan heard the noise, the structural failure of metal, and felt it reverberating through the walls. What was Jean doing? He was half curious, and the other half of him just didn't care. She was toying with him probably.

Even the resultant thud as whatever gave way hit the ground didn't move him from his corner. He thought he could cut through the metal, maybe, if he was really motivated, but he'd just be playing into her plans, and he was in no mood to play. He was very much of the school of wanting to get things over with. Drawing things out unnecessarily never appealed to him.

But the flickering lights and the silence was kind of eerie. He had to give her an A plus for atmosphere.

He was simply sitting there, curled up in his corner waiting for her to begin the next phase, when he notice the wall parallel to him was melting. No, not melting; it became water and splashed to the floor. Nariko came through, dressed in her winter gear save for her gloves, which were off and tucked into her coat pocket. "Logan, thank god, we have to find the others," she said. In Japanese, as she seemed to find it easier, when they were alone, to speak her native tongue. And he never cared; half the time he wasn't sure what language he was speaking anyways.

Another trick of Jean's. A good one too. "She wouldn't let you go. She'd trap you in a mindscape. Stop it, Jean."

Confusion creased her face. "Jean? Look, Logan, it's me. I was in a ... mindscape? I thought I was back at my dad's sushi shack, but my head hurt in a weird way. Then I remembered my head always hurt like that when a telepath read me. I have some sort of built in mental shielding, remember? Xavier couldn't find me after I first used my powers. Remember? You and Scott had to come looking for me."

That was true; he'd forgotten about that. But that was just the kind of detail that made a lie plausible. "I remember. But I also know you can't control it."

"No, I can't. But if my head hurts enough it sort of triggers a ... lockdown, for lack of a better term. I concentrated long enough, and then it kicked in and I found myself here. Did you hear that noise? I don't know what that was. I swear I didn't do it."

He dry washed his face. "Stop it, Jean."

"I'm not Jean! Jean's dead. I don't know what's going on here, but I know the others must be around here somewhere. I've gone through about a dozen walls and you're the first person I've found. It's like some weird cubbyhole for humans or something."

What was this supposed to accomplish exactly? Was she supposed to get his hopes up and then dash them again? That was the definition of a mind game, so probably. "What do you want from me?"

"I want to get out of here!" She replied incredulously. "Don't you?"

"You know I do. That's why you're tormenting me with it."

"What? No! Look, I know there's been some mindfucking going on, but I am real. This is real." What could she do to convince him? She wracked her brain, trying to figure out what she could do to make him realize this wasn't this fake stuff, this was real.

She was considering hitting him when something hit her.

* * *

Nariko went flying into the far wall, so quickly that she didn't even have time to put her hands up and protect herself. She smashed into it face first, and didn't rebound, just sank down to her knees. "You should not have fought me, little girl!" Jean roared, not so much walking in as gliding in.

"Leave her alone," Logan muttered, almost too tired to speak. He wasn't sure why he was so tired. It felt like he was being drained.

Jean ignored him. She had her back to him, so he couldn't see what she was doing to Nariko, but her crazy villain rant continued. "I will not have you or your kind disobeying me! I will not have you destroy my home!"

Nariko made a sort of choking noise. "Stop Jean. Stop it now." She wasn't going to listen, was she? Oh god, she wasn't going to listen. She'd written him off completely.

"You think you can fight me, Kyoko, but you can't. Just because you can block me -"

Logan closed his eyes, and it felt like he'd left his own body, just stepped aside. The only way he could do this, the only way he could survive it, was to let the beast out. So he did.

Logan thought he heard a scream. No, a guttural roar, something from an angry and sick beast. Time took the funniest of hops. He was in the corner for one second, and then he was standing right behind Jean as her body fell to the floor. He'd already cut off her head and sent it flying; it hit the floor first, over near the hole Nariko had made in the wall. "I told you to leave the kids alone!" he screamed, half enraged, half sickened by what she had just forced him to do. He'd killed her again. How many times was he supposed to kill her and rip his own fucking heart out of his chest?

He was panting like he'd run a marathon, and he felt like he might vomit. His claws were still out and Nariko, who had a hand cupped over her bloody nose, was staring at him in wide eyed terror. He could smell her fear, and the beast in him felt it was encouragement. But he was aware enough of himself to be appalled by the thought. He sank to his knees, gutted by the thought of what he'd just done. He didn't know if he wanted to cry or scream. Or both.

"I-It wasn't her," Nariko said quietly, stuttering slightly. Her voice was still shot through with tremors of fear. "It wasn't Jean, Logan, it wasn't her."

He closed his eyes tight against the tears, refusing to cry in front of her.

"Logan, listen to me. She called me Kyoko. Nobody ever called me that except my dad at the sushi shack. She slipped up, she called me what was in my hallucination. Jean never called me Kyoko. Are you listening to me, Logan? Please be Logan. You are Logan, right? And not … well, I don't know. Now I'm rambling because I'm scared. Please say something to shut me up."

Holy shit - she was right. Jean said Kyoko. He was out of himself, but yeah, in retrospect she called her Kyoko. Jean wouldn't do that. She might call her Alchemy, reverting to her code name, but why would she call her by her middle name? That didn't make sense. He felt the psychotic break just waiting to happen drain out of him like sand down a drain. It was a trick, a trap. Son of a bitch - he fell for it. Bastard. _Bastard! _Someone was going to pay for this. Sudden rage gave him his strength back.

"Are you all right?" he asked.

"What?"

Logan opened his eyes, which felt damp, but he'd managed to hold back most of the tears. He stood up, and Nariko continued to eye him warily. "Let me see that."

He retracted his claws, which made her jump, and he grimaced in embarrassment. It felt shockingly fast to him; he couldn't imagine how it would have looked to her. One second she was telekinetically pinned to a wall by an angry, ranting Jean, and the next Jean's head was flying across the room and she was staring at a neck stump spewing blood. He was probably lucky she'd seen him bust out the ultra violence before, or she would have fainted or puked all over the place. He gently grabbed her chin, and she reluctantly let him remove her hand from her nose. It was bleeding profusely, but from what he could tell, the cartilage hadn't fractured. "Lucky you have a small nose. Keep your head tilted back. It's not broken, but it's gonna fuckin' hurt."

"It already kinda does." She only kept her head tilted slightly back, and put the back of her hand against her nose again. "That sound was real."

It took him a moment to figure out what she was talking about. "That metal noise?"

"Yeah. I didn't do it either. I kinda … snapped out of it, I guess, and a couple seconds later, before I'd even made a hole in the wall, I heard it. It was like a big thud. Maybe a wall collapsing, I'm not sure. For a minute I was sure something big and ugly was after me, but the sound didn't continue."

Logan considered that a moment. "Someone else broke out."

"Someone who could take down a wall?" She thought about that a moment. Her fear was gone. "Colossus?"

"Or Zehra."

"Did you think Jean - the Jean thing, whoever she was - got them? Is that why we don't hear it anymore?"

Logan could only shake his head. "No idea. I guess we'll have to find out. We split up. You go -"

"Split up?" she interrupted. "I really don't want to split up right now."

He sighed heavily, and rubbed his eyes. They'd search the base faster if they were separated, but he could understand why she might be a little freaked out. They still had no fucking clue what was going on, or who was running the place, or what was the point. And what about those missing people? They had less than nothing. "Fine, we go together. C'mon." He stepped back, and was going to help her over the Jean/Not Jean's corpse, but it wasn't there.

The body was gone, and so was the head. There was no blood either, just Nariko's. Nariko looked around, so frantically that some blood flecks flew from her nose. "What? How could …" She grabbed her nose again, bit her lip. "Fuck. This isn't a mindscape, I know it isn't! My head would hurt if some telepath was trying to root around again."

Did he still smell a trace of blood in the air? A trace of blood that wasn't Nariko's? He was pretty sure he did. But just a trace, a pinprick. Wow, how many ways was this all wrong? "Either this is a mindscape or it isn't. But right now I'm tired of sitting on my ass, so let's find the others and worry about what the fuck's going on later, okay?" He held her gaze until she found her courage again and nodded.

Logan walked over to an intact wall, popped his claws, and drove them into the wall. It hurt; the tremor of impact ran up his arm, a shiver of pain. His claws went through, but there was resistance. "This is coated with adamantium, or something close to it," he said, dragging his claws down. He cut a sort of X in the wall and kicked out the slices. "Maybe you oughta do the walls from now on."

"Adamantium? Do you think this is … y'know. Organization?"

"No, no way. They're more organized than this - no pun intended - and there'd be a bunch of guys with a fuckload of guns in our face. This is something else."

"What?"

He hated to, but he was forced to shrug. It wasn't likely the Russian version of the Organization, as they too had a love of guys in suits with many big guns. But who else could have done this? And more importantly, why?

He had no answers for her, at least not yet. But the next room was much like his, a little featureless metal box, and he wondered if this was what she meant by a Human cubbyhole. It did seem odd, room after room, all small and bare. Where were the hallways? The connecting corridors? And for fuck's sake, the doors? Didn't most buildings have actual doors?

How did they get put in here? There were no doors to carry them through. A teleporter? That would also explain how the Jean thing disappeared … but it wouldn't explain the disappearance of the blood. So they were facing a telepath, a teleporter, and a … what? He knew there was a gap, he sensed there was a missing piece, but right now he didn't know what it was.

He hoped he didn't have to figure it out the hard way, when they were right in his face. But, on the plus side, being right in his face put them in stabbing range.

Come to think of it, he could live with that.


	7. Chapter 7

7

When the wall suddenly collapsed, John figured the odds were good that Jean had just decided to wipe him out with no muss or fuss. He stood with his back against the wall, ready to light the match, wondering if he'd even get the opportunity to singe her eyebrows off before she vaporized him. Probably not.

But it was Logan who came through the hole in the wall, followed by Nariko, who had probably been the one who turned the wall to sand. "Holy crap man, get the fuck away from me!"

Logan stopped and frowned at him. "It's me, Pyro."

"I know that. Get the fuck away from me! Jean wants your head on a stick!"

Logan scowled. "It wasn't Jean."

"And if she was, it doesn't matter anyways," Nariko added, and drew her finger across her neck in the universal symbol of viciously dead.

John looked at Logan funny. "You cut her throat?"

"Cut off her head," Nariko said, in a kind of hushed whisper.

"Holy fuck, man. You're hardcore. If you do that to friends, what do you do to enemies?"

"Keep this up," Logan growled. "Find out."

"Okay, I'm convinced it you," he said, although it hadn't actually been a test. No, he was just reminded of why he never wanted to fight Logan if he absolutely didn't have to. Most of the time he seemed sane, but in a fight, Logan went totally bugfuck nuts. There was no real way to fight crazy; you just hoped you didn't catch it.

"You fight a telekinetic, you're only gonna get one shot," Logan said, almost defensively. "Gotta take it."

John nodded in complete agreement. That was probably true. That's why he left fighting telekinetics to the crazy people.

Nariko caught him up on what was going on that they knew, but it wasn't much and didn't take long. In a nutshell: fighting people with powers, some unknown, in weird building, can't find anyone, Logan liked none of it. Check. Nothing was a great shock. He almost mentioned the thing with Tasha, but thought better of it. He'd have to explain a lot of it to them, and he really didn't want to. He was starting to suspect that the hallucinations revealed something about them, and he'd give something of himself away. That was unacceptable, especially right now. They knew too much about him as it was.

John simply followed Nariko and Logan, glancing behind them much of the time, figuring Logan could take the front. Empty room after empty room. He started thinking about that movie he saw once on late night TV. What was it called, Cube or something? People trapped in this mysterious place full of booby trapped rooms, people dying off one by one. Was this what this was? In that case, he was happy to stay at the back. Let Logan and Nariko lead the way. Besides, Logan was half way unkillable, right?

In one room, like all the other rooms except maybe a bit colder, Logan paused and sniffed the air. "What?" Nariko asked.

Logan held up a hand, asking for quiet (you needed quiet to smell something? He called shenanigans on that), and walked over to a parallel wall. He ran his hands over it a moment, as if searching for a hidden seam, and said, "Nariko, get us through here."

Why didn't he do it himself? His claws on a smoke break or something? But Nariko didn't complain; she just went over and put her hands flat against the wall, and seconds afterwards the wall started to become sand and fell away, streaming to the floor. It looked darker through the hole, and John thought he smelled something a little different: cold and ozone and maybe a hint of something else. Something stale.

Logan went through first - again, great. If there was a bear trap in the room, it'd probably bust on his leg - but after no one shot him and he wasn't exploded, Nariko looked through and tentatively followed. She shivered and sunk deeper into her shapeless Arctic coat as she looked around, but nothing happened to her, so John followed.

It was a hallway! Or something different than all those endless box like rooms. It was a rectangular box like room, longer than it was wide, the metal on the walls more of a stainless steel color. Once his eyes adjusted to the darkness (of course there were no lights here), John could see the angles shifted precipitously at one end of the corridor. New Age-y design? Was it that feng sway stuff, or whatever the fuck it was called? (Yeah, he'd been in L.A. long enough to know some people got rich enough off it, but he'd never gotten drunk enough to give a rat's ass about it.) Logan headed down that way. "Piotr?" he asked, changing his walk to a sprint.

"Piotr's down there?" John asked, and instantly felt like an idiot. No, it was Piotr Rabbit - who the fuck did he think it was?

Once they were close enough, John saw that the weird angles weren't a structural point but the most visible part of a collapse: part of the ceiling had given way, and what he thought was an oddly sloping wall was some sort of steel beam that had broken through. The walls on either side had buckled but not broken. What the fuck was that about?

Logan finally used his claws to cut through one of the buckled walls - was that smart? - but it held as Logan ducked in. Nariko stood by, looking up at the beam warily, and asked, "How is he?"

After a moment, where metal being cut and stuff being shifted could be heard, Logan replied, "Unconscious, but he's not bleedin'." There was a brief pause before he admitted, "I don't think he did this. The collapse is inward, not outward."

"So who did it?" John wondered. Was this place made out of tin foil? Was it going to start falling like a badly made soufflé?

"Who else?" Logan replied. He returned to the hallway, struggling under the weight of Piotr thrown over his shoulder in a fireman's carry, and John would have offered to help, but, as had already been established, he was not insane. "Zehra's around here somewhere."

"Oh god, not Carrie," John snapped. "Why the hell did she bring the ceiling down? Was she trying to kill him or something?"

"I don't think it was intentional," Logan said, although there was obvious doubt in his voice. "Maybe she was scared. Maybe she tried to fight Jean - or whoever she saw - on her own terms."

"Breaking shit," John translated.

"She doesn't have the best control in the world," Nariko said, making an excuse for her. "The bigger the object, the harder time she has with it."

"Which is why I don't get why you wanted the fucking suicide bomber on your team," John said, aiming that square at Logan. Hey, he was carrying Piotr - he didn't really have a free arm to hit him. Now was an ideal time to bring it up. "She ain't learning control; she ain't learning shit. She refuse to do anything but complain."

"Sounds familiar," Logan grumbled.

John glared at him. "At least I don't set the curtains on fire and complain that no one puts them out fast enough."

Nariko scratched her head. "Is that an apt analogy?"

"Kinda," Logan admitted grudgingly.

"What do you mean kinda?" John protested. "It's totally apt."

Logan stopped and sniffed again - oh, how he'd love to make a dog joke, but he was emotionally attached to both his arms and didn't want to lose either - and then pointed towards the right hand side, farther down the hall. "Over there. Open the wall, darlin'."

Nariko dutifully went up to the wall and turned it to dirt (was it a motif?), and after it had splashed all over the floor, Logan looked in and said, "Fuck."

Well, that was helpful. Very descriptive. He should have been a writer.

Logan crouched down and put Piotr on the floor, then went inside the room. John didn't bother to look; he just waited to see if Logan would be blown up. After a moment he came out, carrying the unconscious Zehra. "She musta had a seizure. The room walls are all bent away from here, like an explosion happened in there. There's no rubble, though."

"See, what did I say? She's a suicide bomber."

Logan scowled at him. "Don't start. She's probably the reason we're out of our cells."

Suddenly a head appeared through the wall, and John yelped in shock, jumping away and turning, matchbook ready to go. But it was just Kitty, looking around in surprise. "Here you guys are. Holy crap, what happened to Piotr and Zehra?"

"Carrie went boom," John said, trying hard to pretend that he just hadn't had the shit scared out of him. "And made the ceiling fall on Piotr when he wasn't metalled out."

"Oh shit," Kitty said, stepping completely out of the wall. She'd probably phased back into solid form, but it was hard to tell. You kind of wanted and expected a certain opacity in a girl who went through stuff, but she always looked solid. It seemed unfair. "Is he badly hurt?"

Logan grunted a slight laugh. "Musclehead? Fuck no. He'll probably have a few bruises and maybe a headache when he wakes up, but he'll be fine."

Kitty nodded at Zehra. "What about her?"

Logan grimaced and shrugged. "I dunno. Shaheen would -" Logan looked up. "Where's Shaheen?"

Kitty got bug eyed, and said, "I'll go find her." And with that, she disappeared back into the wall at a run.

Logan looked down at Piotr, looked at Zehra, and ended up throwing the lighter, smaller girl over his shoulder. "Strong guy's on his own," he said. "It's like trying to lug a buffalo around."

"You lug a lot of buffalos?" John taunted.

Logan gave him a look that promised a grim, ugly death - he wasn't expect any less, really - when he suddenly looked away. As far as John could tell, he was looking at nothing, or was looking for something somewhere behind a wall that was intact. "What? Kitty come back?"

But she hadn't materialized through a wall yet, and Nariko suddenly exclaimed, "What's that?"

John started feeling it now: a low thrum, a faint vibration coming through the floor and echoing off the walls, getting louder and louder, but still weirdly low level. You could almost feel it more than properly hear it. Like maybe someone in a lower level had a bass guitar, and had put their amp face down on the floor and was now tuning up.

"Get out of here," Logan growled, sounding pained. "Get back to the jet. "

John looked at him incredulously as Nariko pointed out, "We don't know where -"

"Go!" He shouted, and seemed to be crumpling with pain, bowing under the weight of it. It made no sense at all until Logan doubled over and grabbed his head, letting out a scream of agony before his legs gave way and he spilled to the floor convulsing briefly, twitching once or twice before coming to a dead stop.

"What the hell ..?" Nariko exclaimed, and quickly dropped to her knees beside him. "Logan?"

"It's a sonic weapon of some kind," John said. He was guessing, but he sounded authoritative. "He's got better hearing than the rest of us, remember? It got him first. We're next." He could actually see a bit of blood trickling from one of Logan's ears. Now that was disgusting. Also, fucking scary - was that going to happen to the rest of them as soon as they turned it up to eleven? Holy shit, they needed to be out of here. Logan could grow new eardrums, but they couldn't. "C'mon!"

"We can't leave them!" Nariko protested, getting to her feet.

"Yeah we can! We come back with the fucking jet, Nari!" At least it sounded like a plan. How it would work precisely was a bit of a guess at this point. But he could feel the noise in his legs now, rising up to his chest, and maybe it was just psychosomatic, but he thought he was getting dizzy.

Nariko must have been feeling it too, as she finally got moving, putting a hole through another wall and disappearing in a leftward direction. Was this the way to the outside? Come to think of it, was there a way to the outside? They had no idea one way or another. But they had no choice but to keep running, and see if they could outrun the noise.

And if not, well, hey, wouldn't be the first time they were totally fucked. It wouldn't even be the first time today.

* * *

Kitty was vaguely aware of the shimmer of the air as she ran through wall after wall, hoping to find Doctor Khoury somewhere in this endless maze of empty rooms. She could kind of hear it, and kind of not. It was a low hum, a kind of grumble almost. She had no idea what it could have been - what made that kind of noise at that volume? - but she didn't like it. She almost expected to run into something making that noise: a huge robot, or maybe one of those walking tank things in The Empire Strikes Back. She had no idea what she would do if she encountered anything like that.

Momentarily she ran into a room, and a voice said, "Finally!" She stopped and saw Doctor Khoury, leaning against the wall in the corner, arms around herself as if she was cold. That was understandable. "I thought you'd forgotten about me."

Kitty solidified, and then she could feel the hum. She'd went to see a band once, and they had their amps turned up so much she could feel the bass in her chest. It was a feeling like that, although minor now. If it got any louder, it would be really uncomfortable. "No, it's just a mess. What's that noise?"

She shrugged. "Either they're moving the building on treads, starting a launch sequence, or it's a weapon of some sort."

She said it so calmly Kitty wasn't sure if she was being facetious or not. The confusing thing about Doctor Khoury was nothing seemed to bother her, ever. On the plus side, she was exactly who you wanted in a crisis: she didn't panic. On the negative side, that made you want to hit her. Goddamn it, would it kill her just to freak out for a second? "A weapon?"

"You haven't heard of them? There are a number of audio frequencies that are, admittedly, hard to generate, but can trigger unconsciousness or other forms of incapacitation. I know a number of militaries are working on it, although I'm sure all the precious funds squandered on developing "gay bombs" have put them years behind the Organization."

"Huh?"

"Forget it. Now's not the time for me to make snarky political comments. Give me your hand."

Kitty was still deeply confused, and the rising noise - which seemed to be putting a great deal of fog in her brain - didn't help. But she had to grab Khoury to take her through the walls, so she did give her her hand. Khoury took it, then said, "If you're intangible, do you think you can avoid the worst of the sound waves?"

"I don't know. It's worth a shot, I guess."

"Am I right in what I read in your file? You can sometimes disrupt machinery?"

Kitty nodded. Was the room spinning?

"Okay. I'm going to use my power to boost your intangibility. We need to find what's powering this base and shut it down. When we find it - if we find it - you need to gut the fuck out of the machinery. You understand?"

She nodded. Khoury had powers? Oh, right, she did. It was getting really hard to think now. But Khoury looked fine, unflappable, and calm, and Kitty found that reassuring. If she wasn't losing it, there was no reason for her to lose it, even if the room had become a Tilt-A-Whirl. "Yeah."

"Let's get going, sweetheart," she said, and tightened her grip on her hand.

It was extraordinary. One second she was physical and miserable, and then suddenly, she wasn't. She felt instantly freed from the heavy shackles of confusion, and while she could sense the continued vibration of noise, it was beyond her, outside of her. She felt wonderful; she felt like a photon, a particle of light.

Kitty plunged through the floor, bringing Khoury with her, and Kitty felt like she could move at the speed of light, not even running but gliding, swimming through atoms with only the slightest momentum. It was like she could move through will alone.

She sank through another similar floor of metal boxes, and started moving through them, going so fast that they were little more than a blur. But if anything unusual came up, something where nothing usually was, she could stop.

So this was what a power boost was like, huh? It was awesome. Although Kitty was all for getting out of this mousetrap, she kind of hoped she could keep this feeling for a little while longer.


	8. Chapter 8

8

John felt like he did that one time he shotgunned a couple of beers and went on a roller coaster. His head was swirling, moving one way, while his stomach moved another way. To call it unpleasant was an understatement; there were no words for how awful it was.

His gut finally decided it had enough and tried to leave through his throat. He vomited, hot bile burning his throat, and his stomach spasmed until he didn't have anything left in him. Holy fuck, he hadn't barfed so much since he tried Everclear.

"You were always weak," a cultured – and familiar – voice said.

John looked up and saw Magneto standing at the end of the hall, smirking down at him like an amusing new insect he'd just discovered in his shoe. "What the fuck is this?" he wondered aloud. It was another trick, like Tasha was a trick, although Mags wasn't dead. (Well, not to his knowledge.)

"Still slow on the uptake, boy? Who else could build a place like this? All metal, without doors? Did you learn nothing working for me?"

It was an illusion, it had to be, but ... he had a point. As long as it was all metal, Mags didn't need a door; he just created them and closed them up at will. "You were given the cure."

"Which is temporary at best. We're all returning to normal. Well, abnormal. As we were meant to be."

John forced himself up to a sitting position. He still felt like shit, but at least he knew he wasn't going to barf. "You wouldn't be here. Why the fuck would you be in Russia?"

"Exactly. Why would anyone look for me here? Strategy was never your strong suit."

"Since when do you hide? Magneto would never hide in the farthest corner of the world."

"There's a difference between hiding and regrouping, boy. But I don't expect _you_ to know the difference."

"What the fuck is this? Why are you being a dick to me?"

His gaze was witheringly cold, and very Magneto-like. If it was a hallucination, it was a detailed one. "You really are as stupid as I feared. Do you know why I made you my front line guard? Your power wasn't that special; Mystique was always better and more effective than you. I put you out front as a constant reminder to Charles of his failure. You were a taunt, and nothing more."

"No." That wasn't true. That couldn't be true. He told him he was a god amongst insects. "You told me I was special."

"Oh yes. I use that line a lot."

John was getting angry, and that made him feel stronger. He reached out to the nearby wall, and used it to help him stand up. "Bullshit. This is complete bullshit."

"Is it? Those who overcompensate the most – those who try to seem hard or dangerous – are the weakest ones. You tried far too hard, boy. But I found it funny."

"Bullshit! You're just pissed off that I went back to the X-Men!" Remembering the matches in his hand, he flicked the sulfur head of one with a fingernail, creating a spark, and he threw a fireball right at Magneto's face. No metal in flames.

It went right through him, and he smirked. "Mental projection. Or did you forget about the telepath?"

"Why did you just do that?" Nariko asked. "Who are you talking to?"

"If I see you, I'm gonna motherfucking kill you," he told him. "I'll burn your face right off."

Magneto continued to smirk at him. "You're free to try." He then disappeared from existence, like he'd never been there at all.

"You sure as hell better not have been talking to me," Nariko snapped.

He glanced down at her as she picked herself up off the floor, avoiding his puddle of puke. "No. I thought ..."

"Thought what?"

He considered telling her, then shook his head. "Nothing. C'mon, let's keep going." If it was just a hallucination, then he was revealing something of himself by admitting that Magneto's praise and respect still meant something to him, even though they were on opposite sides once more. Goddamn it, why did it matter? He stopped being a bad guy, after all. If Mags opinion of him mattered that much, why did he go?

"But the sound's stopped," she replied. "And the lights are out."

John glanced up, and saw that they were. Son of a bitch. How did he miss that? "But Logan told us to go." It was weak, but all he could think of. He wanted to leave this place now. If Magneto was here, they were screwed, as he could easily take out their two heavy hitters (Logan and Piotr). If it wasn't Mags doing, just some fucked up group of mutants, they were still probably screwed, because none of this made any sense. What could they want from them? They were like hamsters in a maze.

Hey, that was it: rodents in a maze. These fucks, whoever they were, were simply sadists. They were running them through their paces, seeing what they could do, but for no reason other than to torment them. They probably wanted nothing more from them than entertainment. Motherfuckers.

"We should really stick together," she said, and headed back through the hole in the wall she'd made shortly before they both passed out.

Oh goddamn it! See, that's what a goody two-shoes did. It didn't speak well for him, did it?

It made him wonder why he wanted to be a hero in the first place.

* * *

The lowest level of the complex – well, Shaheen assumed it was – was a very strange place.

Machinery that was both vague and disturbing seem to reach from floor to ceiling. There were tiny walkways between clumps of awkward machines, the only concession to Human occupation. It was cold down here, in spite of the obvious heat that had been coming from the machines, and smelled like dust.

"Well, this is spooky," Kitty said. Even though they had been separated for a couple of minutes, Kitty still seemed jazzed by the power boost. Sweat had beaded on her forehead, and was probably responsible for her shivering. "What the hell is all of this? Do you know?"

"I'm a doctor, not an engineer," she said, looking at a couple of stacked up metal boxes that appeared to be connected by cables as thick as branches. The boxes looked a bit like an old vent hood, and something like a safe made of tin foil. "But a lot of this looked hastily cobbled together."

"Which means ..?"

"Sweetheart, I have no idea." She ran her finger along the edge of one of the metal boxes, and came away with a thick layer of dust on her fingertip. "But I can tell you no one's been down here for a while."

"Really? You'd think someone would need to ... monitor this or something."

"You'd think, wouldn't you?" Shaheen kept looking around, and she had no idea what she was looking for, although she felt there was an answer here that she just wasn't seeing.

"You're frowning."

"Am I?"

"That usually means you know something the rest of us don't."

"I know where the spleen is."

Kitty rolled her eyes. "Now is so not the time to joke."

"It wasn't a joke. Also, come to think of it, probably not accurate. Logan probably knows where the spleen is. His knowledge of anatomy is frightening."

"I think it's because he stabs people."

"I think so too. It's enough to give you the willies."

She walked to the opposite end of the wide, long room, drawn by something she couldn't quite name. Once there, she put her hands on the wall, and felt what must have drawn her in. "Kitty, come here."

"What?"

"Not all the power's off."

"Huh?"

Kitty joined her, and put her hands up against the wall too. She opened her mouth to say something, perhaps that she felt nothing, but she closed it as she must have finally picked up the faint vibrations in the wall. She went partially intangible and stuck her head through. After a moment, she pulled back out. "Oh my god. You have to see this."

Shaheen held out her hand, which Kitty took, and pulled them both through the wall, into another room. It was rectangular, but smaller and narrower than what Shaheen assumed was the main room. There was only one thing in this room, but it was huge. It was basically a torpedo/coffin shaped silver tablet, about eight feet long and six feet deep, and it hummed. "Is that a bomb?" Kitty asked, horrified.

It was embedded in the floor via a silver metal pedestal; it seemed to be melted down into one piece. There was a thin seam running along the entire length of the coffin, but it looked welded shut. "I don't know. I don't think so. Can you look inside?"

She seemed nervous, but she said, "I guess so," and edged up to the torpedo. She just went partially intangible and put her face against it, peering inside cautiously. Was she afraid she'd set it off? Or maybe something would reach out and grab her?

She withdrew quickly and let out a small shriek, stumbling and falling on her ass as she became tangible again. "Oh holy shit!"

"What is it?"

Kitty stared at the torpedo as if it was going to come alive and attack her. "It's a head."

"What?"

"A severed head." She slapped a hand on her mouth, as if she was going to get sick.

A severed head in a torpedo tube? Well, wasn't that bizarre? What could it possibly mean?

* * *

By the time that they made their way back to the group, Logan was regaining consciousness. "Aw fuck," he cursed, grabbing his head.

"You have a huge vocabulary," John said. He was still shaken up by whatever it was he thought he saw, but he was trying to pretend he wasn't. It occurred to Nariko that John seemed to always be pretending in one way or another. How insecure did you have to be?

"Eat me, Pyro," Logan said, sitting up. He then looked at them, and asked, "Didn't I tell you to go?"

"We did. But she wanted to come back."

"The power's off," she told him, pointing up at the ceiling where the lights were once on. "The noise has stopped. And frankly, we haven't the slightest idea where we're going."

"Never stopped me before," Logan muttered, dry washing his face.

"Who hit me?" Piotr asked, coming around himself.

"The ceiling," Logan said, climbing to his feet.

Piotr looked up at him, considering that. "Explains a lot."

"Think the sound overloaded shit or something?" John wondered.

Logan shook his head. "I doubt it. If they made the weapon, they could control it." He paused, looked around, and said, "Kitty isn't back."

Nariko felt guilty for not noticing until he mentioned it. "Oh. Hell. Do you think she's hurt? Or still looking for the Doctor?"

He rubbed the back of his neck, scowling at nothing. There was dried blood on his neck. "Maybe that's why the power shut down. Kitty and Shaheen went to find the source."

"Could they do that?" John asked skeptically.

"Intangible, the sound probably wouldn't be effective on Kitty," Logan replied. "I doubt she'd leave Shaheen to suffer."

"Good point."

Suddenly an alarm went off, and most of them jumped. "Well, not all the power's off," John shouted, covering his ears.

Nariko sidled up to Logan, and asked, "What is this? A fire alarm?"

He scowled and shrugged. He didn't look happy. "This is bullshit. I'm fucking done with this." Logan started stalking down the hall, and shouted, "Hey, you want me! Come and get me! Knock this shit off and face me, you fucking coward!"

"Oh, please don't taunt them," Nariko said, aware she was being ignored.

The vibrations came back. But no, they were different this time, and even though the alarm cut out, the noise got louder. You could see actual ripples in the metal plating on the wall. In fact, that's what was moving, wasn't it? The walls were moving. Or at least the metal plating was.

"Holy shit," John said, sounding genuinely scared. "It is him. Oh shit. Logan, don't, you can't fight him."

"Can't fight who?"

"Magneto. It's Magneto. I thought it was a trick, but -"

"It is a trick," he snapped. "I can smell Mags a mile away. He isn't here."

"The air scrubbers -"

"Can't beat my fucking nose," he interrupted. "In fact, the only people that have been here recently have been us. This place smells like baked dust and ozone, an air circulation system gone stale. This place is a fucking ghost town. So where the fuck are you hiding, assholes?!"

"That's not aimed at us, is it?" Kitty asked. Her head was poking up through the floor, just a few feet away from Logan. She saw the rattling plating, and asked, "Holy hell, what's causing that?"

"Magneto," John said miserably.

"It's not Magneto," Logan snapped. "What'cha found, darlin'?"

"Some really weird shit." She grimaced at her own cursing, then continued. "Doctor Khoury wanted me to come get all of you. We found something, but we're not sure what to make of it. She said this was a house of horrors and that you – Logan – might be especially interested in it, but she didn't say why. I can't really imagine why, except it involves decapitation."

Nariko stared at her in horror. "Doctor Khoury's been decapitated?"

"No! No. But someone has. I just don't know who."

Logan sighed and crouched down, reaching his hand out towards Kitty. "Take me there, kid."

Nariko wondered if this was voluntary. Because she wasn't sure she wanted to go see a severed head.


	9. Chapter 9

9

You didn't really know how small a room was until you tried to cram a bunch of people in it. Especially a room dominated by a futuristic metal coffin. It was like having a wake in a coat closet; they were all crammed around it, with little room to move, and from what Logan could tell by scent, almost no one was at ease around it.

Save for Shaheen, who remained more curious than concerned. Then again, if you were pretty sure you were immortal, how much would anything bug you? (Well, he had the potential to live for a fucking long time, and the idea made him slightly ill. But people accepted things differently, and Shaheen had an odd Spock-ish quality to her. In spite of the fact that she seemed like the world's most together person, he bet she had something surprisingly nasty in her past. A gay woman in Algeria? Yeah, there was no way her life was free of ugliness.) She wasn't just standing closest to the coffin, she had her hands on it as he came up to it, and he frowned at her curiously. "Got a spot for me to cut?"

"I don't know. I don't even know if it's wise. It's warm."

He put a hand on the surface. She was right; it had a faint but obvious warmth, and he could also feel a subtle vibration.

"Yeah, well, the power's on," John remarked. He was standing near the edge of the room, occasionally glancing at the machines around them as if he didn't trust them. "It's gonna be warm."

"But why is it on?" Shaheen asked, in a patient teacher voice. "Why does this have its own power source? It's weird, isn't it?"

John shrugged, aggressively disinterested. "What isn't in this place?"

"This makes even less sense than the rest of this shit," Logan pointed out. "If it has a separate power source, presumably that means it's important. It's a severed head in a tube. How in the fuck is that important?"

"Is it Walt Disney's head?" Nariko asked, attempting to make a joke. From the baffled look Piotr gave her, not everyone got it.

Shaheen was giving him a look though, one with a slightly raised eyebrow. She had already come to a conclusion about it, and was trying to will it into Logan's mind. Not that he needed her to – there was really only one conclusion to draw. It made no fucking sense and was batshit insane, but what wasn't around here? Nothing had made sense since they found the empty village.

"I think -" he began, but was cut off by the sound of an alert klaxon ripping through the base, followed by an automated voice saying, "Self-destruct has been activated. Destruction commencing within thirty seconds."

"Whoa!" John shouted, looking more angry than startled. "What the fuck did you do?!"

Everyone looked slightly panicked, except for Shaheen, who had already been established as Vulcan. "What do we do?" Piotr asked.

"Nothing. It's a bluff."

"How do you know that?" Kitty asked him desperately. She wanted to believe, but it wasn't clear if she actually did.

"'Cause it doesn't make sense. We touched nothing. We just freaked him out. Or her. Was it a him or a her? Could you tell?"

Kitty stared back at him, uncomprehending. "What?"

"Self-destruct in twenty five seconds," Robo-voice announced.

"Self-destruct my ass," Logan snapped down at the coffin. "We're not gonna hurt ya, so give it a rest, huh? We're the good guys."

"In theory," John muttered.

Nariko seemed to get it before Kitty did. "No way. No fucking way. You're saying that head's alive?"

"No," Piotr said, looking slightly shell shocked. It wasn't that he was denying the possibility of it more than he simply didn't want it to be true. He seemed to forget he was still carrying Zehra, still slung over one muscular shoulder, but she didn't fall off. Pete was a big pile of muscle.

Shaheen was nodding. "It makes sense. You know what has their own back up generators in hospitals? Life support systems."

"There's no way in hell that can be alive!" Kitty insisted. "It's a head on a ... well, a pad, or maybe a flattened pillow, I dunno, but nobody could live without a body."

"In theory," Shaheen said. "But we're mutants. In theory, no one should be able to turn intangible, or become metal, or survive a full body bone graft." In case no one got that reference, she glanced at Logan. "The rulebook can be thrown out with us. Why couldn't someone have a healing factor so perverse that they could actually stay alive if only their brain was functioning?" He liked how she called it perverse, because that's exactly what it was. Little was more perverse than waking up and discovering you have a sucking chest wound so deep you can see your own ribcage. And worse yet, watching your muscles and skin actually grow back. "You told me it was hooked up to something, Kitty. Maybe that's all it needs to keep going."

"But ... no! It wasn't stuff, it was like ... wires. Wires coming out of the scalp, and this ... ring on top. Or maybe it was a headband. Look, as soon as I saw it I was outta there, so maybe I didn't get a good look."

"Look again."

"Fuck you!" she replied reflexively, and as soon as she realized what she said and who she said it to, she slapped her hands over her mouth and looked as terror stricken as he had ever seen her. "Oh, no. Oh, Logan, I didn't mean -"

"I don't care. Let me have a look if you ain't gonna." He held out his hand in invitation.

She didn't look reluctant more than she looked rooted to the spot – she didn't want to do this, even though she wouldn't be looking in. But finally she stepped up to him and grabbed his arm, and he turned towards the silver coffin.

He closed his eyes for a couple of seconds, trying to force accustomedness to the dark, then leaned forward, into the container.

It turned out he only needed to be accustomed to the dimness, as there were a couple of lights inside, no bigger than pinpricks and almost as dull. But they showed what Kitty had said: a severed head on a dark colored cushion. It was very pale, almost albino, the eyes closed and the veins like blue worms beneath thin skin. The planes of the face were sharp, cheekbones like straight razors and the chin almost pointed, the eyes sunken in pits that used to be sockets. The ghostly face was androgynous enough that telling the gender was impossible.

What appeared to be wiry hair at first was simply wire, embedded in the flesh and emerging to connect to the interior of the coffin in ways that weren't clear. There was a thin (copper?) band surrounding the scalp, and Logan would have bet money that there were electrodes or some other type of sensor in there. But the way it was thickly wired to the side, it also functioned as a restraining device, although it was hardly going anywhere. The severing, as far as he could tell, was clean, so clean it was surgical. He wished he could take a sense perception, stay around longer, but he couldn't. So he pulled out and Kitty let go of his arm, allowing him to breathe again. "That is messed up."

"What did I tell you?" Kitty replied.

"So it really is a head in a box?" John asked.

"It is."

"Any signs of life?" Shaheen asked.

He had to think about that a moment. "Yeah. It wasn't decomposed. The veins looked good."

"I think she meant like breathing, dude," John interjected.

Shaheen gave him that wry half-smile of hers. "No, I didn't. Now we have to figure out if they can communicate with us or not."

"Could it be the telepath?"

She shrugged. "Your guess is as good as mine."

Yeah, this was fucked, and there were no easy answers. They could crack the coffin open, but if it was an intricate life support system, they could kill it. If it was an enemy, fine – attempting to kill them meant all bets were off. But how deadly could a head in a box be? There was no way this guy – and he was just going to think of it as a gender neutral Guy – could have arranged all of this. This was a piece of the puzzle, but not all of it. "Can you talk to us?" Logan said in Russian. "We can help you get out of here, just communicate with us. We don't want to hurt you."

"Oh god, there he goes with the languages again," John bitched.

"We don't," Piotr – the only other Russian speaker in the room – agreed. "Who did this to you? Who built this place?"

"You don't speak French, do you?" Shaheen said wryly, looking down at the coffin. "I'm really good with French."

The klaxon and self-destruct warnings stopped dead. Silence filled its absence, but after several seconds, Kitty asked nervously, "Is this a good sign or a bad one?"

Logan shrugged. It could have gone either way. "We'll see."

Suddenly Jean appeared in the far corner, which wasn't really that far away. Kitty jumped, but no one else really reacted. "What kind of trick is this? Do you think I'm an idiot?"

"I think you're dead," John replied.

"This isn't a trick," Shaheen said. "We're not that organized."

"What do you think is going on here?" Logan wondered. "Why did you bring us here?"

Jean scowled angrily. "I didn't bring you here."

"Who did?" he asked.

She glared at them, eyes scudding from face to face. He had no idea what she was searching for. "What is the point of this test?"

Shaheen shook her head. "Sweetheart, you're not getting us. This isn't test. We're real people, and we're trying to figure out what the hell is going on."

"Is that what this is?" Logan asked the Jean projection. "Is this some kind of proving ground? Do you run mutants through their paces?"

"Are you working with the government?" Piotr asked.

Her eyes narrowed, and Logan noticed that her eyes were reddish-brown. An error, or a clue? "I've been doing my job. There's no reason for this."

John made a noise of disgust. "It's like talking to a doorknob."

"What is your job?" Shaheen asked. She wasn't getting impatient, but then again, Logan already knew she could answer a question with a question ad infinitum; she seemed to think it was funny. "Assume we're idiots."

"Not a big assumption," John cracked.

The Jean thing looked genuinely confused, enough that Logan almost felt bad for it. "Who's your leader?"

"Storm, I guess," John said. "But I'm not sure why. 'Ooh, I can make it rain.' I mean, whatever. Maybe that's impressive during a drought, but otherwise it just seems like fucking around with the greenhouse effect."

Logan sighed impatiently and gave him an evil glance, but turned his attention back to the Jean clone. "Of this group? I am, I guess. Who's your boss?"

Her expression remained skeptical. "You're a killer."

"Well, duh," John said.

"Will you please shut the hell up?" Nariko snapped at him. "We get it, you're bitter and jaded. Guess what? No one cares! So shut up!"

John stared at her in slack jawed surprise, along with Kitty and Piotr. Shaheen said, "It's always the quiet ones who snap first."

"Actually, it's usually me," Logan pointed out, and then returned his gaze to Jean. "And you're a killer too, aren't you? Where are the missing people? You know, don't you?"

She scowled, her lips becoming a razor thin line. Ironically, she looked more like Jean than she ever had. "I don't understand this test."

John threw his hands in the air and let them slap down at his sides, but that was the bulk of his comments. Shaheen said, "This isn't a test. How do we prove that to you?"

Jean considered that a moment, and then said, "I need to talk to the leader."

Logan thought it meant his/her leader, but as soon as he felt a sudden, sharp pain deep in his head, he realized he'd just volunteered for something. Damn it.

Logan's head jerked back, as if he'd just been punched by an invisible man, and Piotr caught him barely before he hit the floor. "What the hell just happened?" Kitty asked.

Shaheen looked to the corner to ask Jean, but she was gone. Of course she was gone. She had no idea how much energy it took to cause a mass illusion, but it was probably a strain on the system. She knelt beside Logan as Piotr lowered him the rest of the way to the floor, and checked his pulse by touching his neck. Felt good; Logan had a frighteningly powerful heartbeat, like his heart honestly wanted to burst out of his chest and kick your ass on its own. If any organ could actually do that, it would be Logan's. Oh, and maybe one belonging to whoever it was in the torpedo tube.

"I think it just stole him away for a telepathic tete-a-tete. See, I do speak French." Nobody seemed to appreciate that joke. Logan would have appreciated it.

"Since when do telepaths communicate like this?" Piotr asked, looking like he wasn't sure if he should start punching things or not.

She could only shrug. "Since when do you find living heads in a tube?"

Not even John had a smart ass answer to that one. Or if he did, he was sufficiently scared of Nariko to keep it to himself.

She decided to give him five minutes. Either Logan fought his way back or the head let him go. If neither happened, she'd have Nariko open the tube.

She didn't relish having to kill anyone. But if they didn't get Logan back, they weren't going anywhere.


	10. Chapter 10

10

Logan found himself sitting in an office. It was a very plain office, with dingy white walls and cheap, decrepit looking furniture, set off with a beige rug that could have very well been a large stain.

Behind the rickety, cheap desk was a man, as nondescript but slightly dumpy as his surroundings. Pale, doughy, and balding, he was every inch the pasty bureaucrat, with the only thing distinguishing him from others being his olive drab wardrobe. Not quite army fatigues, but the color scheme was the same. All he needed was ill fitting glasses to complete the effect.

"What is the point of this test?" the man asked.

Logan sighed, slumping back in his chair. "Don't fucking start. If this was a test, you'd have already failed it by now."

That made him put his pen down and stare at him. Not a glare, there was no anger behind it, it was just a look of incomprehension. "I've failed the test?"

"Would it bring an end to this if I said yes?"

The man continued to eye him with great wariness. He picked up his pen and tapped it on his desk in a nervous, impatient way. "You are Organization, yes?"

"I was. I left."

"Nobody leaves the Organization."

"I did. Can't say they liked it, but I don't give a shit."

The man scratched his balding pate. "You're not lying." Not a question.

"You're the telepath, right? Look at my most recent memories. That's you, your head in a box. Well, coffin. It's a severed head in a thing."

"No."

"Yes." Logan suddenly realized why he was looking so uncomfortable. "You don't know, do you?"

The bureaucrat was shaking his head vehemently now. If he had been wearing glasses, they'd have gone flying off. "No no no, that's not possible."

"It is possible. You had a healing factor, right? I got one too. I dunno if it's strong enough to keep me alive in spite of decapitation, but I really don't wanna find out."

"No. This is a lie. You're trying to trick me."

"To what end? You're a telepath; I can't trick you."

He was still shaking his head, but he was so upset it was starting to bleed into the mindscape. The walls were warping, bowing in as if under a great weight, the water stained ceiling becoming a dome as it bubbled. Who needed hallucinogens when you were dealing with a emotionally disturbed (and sanity challenged? He was starting to wonder, because Jean's erratic nature couldn't have all been an act) telepath? Luckily, he was too accustomed to the relative madness of other dimensions and Bob's house to be truly disturbed by what seemed to be a melting mindscape, one turning from solid to liquid as the guy started to lose his shit. "No," he insisted, and started panting like he'd just run a marathon. Panic attack? "That isn't possible. They wouldn't do that."

"It's already happened. Sorry man. Or woman, whatever. Who did this to you?"

The man buried his head in his hands, and started muttering to himself. "Not true, not true ..."

"You know it is. I ain't lyin'."

"You ... you have blocks in your head. I don't recognize them ..."

Some lingering bits of Bob power? Some of the mental fucking the Organization did to him? He supposed it didn't really matter either way. If it was Organization, it was just the psychic equivalent of scars; if it was Bob traces, it could kill him if he/she pursued them too far. "Not blocks I can control. I'm not hiding anything from you. Look through my eyes, see what I see, and tell me it's bullshit. My powers are physical, not psychic – unlike you, I don't have both. I'm just here looking for the missing people, that's all. Tell me what's happened to them, and we'll go."

But the guy (unisex Guy) wasn't paying attention to him. He had his head in his hands and was keening quietly between muttering. It was a continued variation on "No no no". Logan kicked the desk, making a loud noise and making the man bolt upright in his seat. "Was it the government? They did this to you? Look, I get that. I got screwed over by mine too. How do you think I ended up in the Organization? There's something inevitable about governments screwing over mutants."

"They wouldn't do that to me!" he shouted, suddenly angry. He was on his feet in a second, suddenly sweeping everything off his desk and onto the floor, a violent, desperate gesture that either made no sense or every bit of sense in this limited, warping mindscape. "They were ... they were supposed to make me better! They were gonna make me perfect! They did, they made me perfect! I saw!"

Logan was starting to understand, even though it didn't make a lot of sense. Well, no, it made a kind of sense, but it was sick as all fuck. "You saw a lie. I don't know how, if they brought in a stronger telepath without your knowledge of if it's somehow tied in to the machines you're connected to -"

"Machines? I'm connected to machines?!"

Logan rubbed his eyes, and wondered why he had to shout in a mindscape. "'Kay, look at my recent memories already. They'll tell you what you need to know. You got my permission. Go nuts." Not that he needed permission, being both a telepath and a bit of a dick, but now he wasn't angry. If anything, he kind of felt sorry for the bastard. He had no idea what was actually going on, did he? He was living a life being fed to him, possibly through machines, possibly through some other means, but he was probably as lost as they were. The difference was, he didn't know it. Not until now, at any rate.

He stood there in the middle of the detritus he knocked off his desk, breathing hard, arms wrapped around his head. Logan had no idea if he looked into his mind while doing this, all he knew was he finally melted, slowly collapsing on the floor like he was sinking in invisible quicksand. "This is a nightmare."

"Yeah, I agree. Why don't you tell me how it started?" He wanted to add _"And make it fast"_ but he didn't, because that might have unnerved him further.

It was just that, knowing his crew, it wouldn't have much time to explain itself before somebody started using it as a soccer ball.

* * *

  


* * *

  


"At what point do we crack open the case and get to the chewy nougat center?" John asked, being both insensitive and gross at the same time.

Not that Shaheen was particularly surprised that he was the first one to bring it up. He was like that. The betting pool for how long it took Logan to smack him across the room was rather large, and if he didn't do it within three days, she was out twenty dollars. "Give it a couple of minutes. Logan doesn't appear to be in any distress."

"So we just stand around twiddling our thumbs like a bunch of morons?" John complained.

"What would you suggest we do?" Piotr asked, an edge to his voice.

"Besides kick the ass of the headless dude? Why don't we try and get the fuck out of here? Burn a few holes in the wall."

Kitty clicked her tongue in disgust. "Do you even know the size of this place? It's massive. If we wander off with no idea where we're going, we could be wandering this place for days."

"So scout ahead," he told her. Kitty just glared at him.

"Whoever's ass I'm looking at, will you put me down?" Zehra snapped.

Piotr seemed startled she was awake, but put her down. She straightened up and looked around, annoyed, as if they'd knocked her out on purpose. "What the hell is this place?"

"We're still trying to determine that," Shaheen said. She wanted to ask her how she was, maybe test for pupil reaction to make sure she was okay, but she wouldn't allow it with a crowd around. Zehra preferred people hate her, as the other option was pity, and she simply wouldn't tolerate that. So she came off as the world's biggest bitch. It struck Shaheen as a drastic choice.

Zehra then noticed Logan on the floor. "What's his deal?"

"We think he's talking with the telepathic head in the box," John said.

She glared at him. "What the fuck are you talking about?"

So they got her up to speed, which killed a couple of minutes and stopped the current argument, skewing it towards a slight variation on the argument. Shaheen wondered, not for the first time, if Logan had actually picked the team or if he'd been assigned some. Because, when you boiled it down, most of them were weirdos – if they had decent powers (and Shaheen didn't count herself in that group; her power was pretty rubbish), they still seemed off in some fashion. Or maybe it was just their personalities that were off. Either way, she had the sinking feeling they were all where they probably deserved to be.

"What the hell's the problem?" Zehra finally exclaimed. "Just kill the head and let's get out of this fucking nightmare."

"I second that," John said.

"Um," Kitty said, biting her lip. "I don't know if we should. Or if we even can. I mean, if they can live without a body ..."

"It's hooked up to a machine," John replied. "She said so." He gestured to Shaheen, in case no one knew the exact she he was referring to.

"I do have a name, John," she replied coolly. "And I think we should give Logan some time to get some answers before we do anything drastic."

"And how does he do that unconscious on the floor?" Zehra asked. "He's not the type to do it anyways. He's all slice and dice."

"He's smart enough to know we need more information. We're not getting out of here without it."

"You're assuming we're getting out of here at all," Zehra countered darkly.

John snorted derisively. "Just bring down some more ceilings, Suicide Bomber. We'll get there eventually."

"Don't call me that."

"What do I call you then? You don't like Carrie either."

"How about you -"

Logan sat up then, busting up the argument before it had a chance to really get going. Since Shaheen was still crouched on the floor next to him, he was the first one he talked to. "We have to move fast."

"What's going on?" Shaheen wondered, as doors suddenly appeared in the walls. They irised open, one after another, opening up a visible trail.

"There's doors?" Piotr asked, shocked. "Why didn't we see seams? Why did the metal seem uniformly thick?"

"There's an extensive use of non-traditional holography in this place," Logan said, jumping up to his feet. "As well as the fact that people who can see them can only be allowed to see them through the Central Brain. C'mon, Taras is running interference for us for now, but as soon as the Overseer realizes what's going on, it could all shut down."

"Wait, what?" Nariko asked. "Central Brain? Overseer? What's going on? Am I misinterpreting these words?"

"Why would Jack-In-The-Box run interference for us?" John asked. "What's in it for him?"

"We made an agreement: he helps us, I help him. Now c'mon, we gotta go." Logan was already in the adjoining room, and crossing the threshold to the one beyond.

"Help him how?" John wondered suspiciously.

"What are we supposed to be doing?" Shaheen asked, as she felt that was the more relevant question. She kind of had the idea of what the head probably wanted anyways.

"We have to get to the Central Brain."

"That's a metaphor, right?" Piotr asked. The prospect of it seemed to make him a little nervous. "Just a name? There isn't anymore disembodied body parts floating around here, are there?"

"What are we gonna do at the Central Brain?" Kitty asked, almost talking over Piotr. They had nothing but questions, and Logan presumably had the answers, but time must have been working against them, because he was already so far ahead of them they were losing sight of him. Yet his voice floated back, loud and clear.

"We're gonna kill it."

Shaheen had been afraid he was going to say that. But at least it was something this team was more than equipped to handle.


	11. Chapter 11

11

Logan wasn't sure what the "central brain" looked like. He just hoped he'd know it when he saw it.

Taras was helpful, but only up to a point. Truth was, he was a bit fucked in the head – a bit? Who was he kidding? The dude (he was assuming dude; ultimately, he didn't know) was bugfuck nuts. And how could he not be? He was decapitated and hooked up to machines, some kind of artificial intelligence program (he assumed), that kept him believing things that simply weren't true. From what he could tell, he'd been living in a dream world. It was impossible to tell for how long, but long enough for his sanity to degrade considerably. Logan wasn't sure he could trust him, but he could if only because he wanted something from him, and Logan wouldn't deliver until he got what he wanted.

In Taras's mind, the base was huge (true), well staffed (totally false), and kind of like an office building staffed with mostly military personnel (yeah, right). Also, Russia was the dominant world power. Logan wasn't even sure communism had collapsed in his world, meaning he could have been trapped in that super-sized feedback machine for decades. It begged the question why, but from what he'd been able to discern, it was some kind of training module that went far off the rails. Or maybe even a war simulator that got hopelessly mired in bureaucracy, as if the AI became intelligent enough to realize that almost everything in the universe boiled down to paperwork. (What a horrifying thought.)

The kids were grumbling, they wanted more information, but he wasn't inclined to give it to them just yet. Mainly because a lot of what he had didn't make sense, and he felt he'd been a big enough idiot as it was. And no one would be happy with what he had agreed to do for Taras. Well, maybe John and Zehra.

The doorways seemed to lead downwards. In a technical sense, they couldn't, but there was a feeling of gradually sinking that Logan couldn't shake off. Maybe it was just in his head.

The more they went inward, the more the rooms smelled of dust and long emptiness. It got to a point where there wasn't even equipment in the rooms; they were just empty boxes like the ones they'd been trapped in. "This was a prison," Zehra said, and Logan added that to the list of possibilities. Maybe. He got no sense that Taras was a criminal, but Taras's mindscape was so fucked up, he was probably lucky he wasn't crazy too. Well, crazier.

Eventually there was a feeling of vibration through the metal floor plating, a rising and falling thrum that had its own rhythm, like a heartbeat. He seemed to feel it ahead of everyone else, but Kitty was the next to pick it up. "What's that?"

"It's not another sonic weapon, is it?" John asked, sounding annoyed. As soon as they were out of here, Logan had decided to punch him. Not too hard, just enough to wind him for a minute.

"Can't be," Shaheen said. "Kitty gutted that sucker. This is different."

"I'm smelling ozone," Logan said. "Electricity build up. It may be a generator."

"Another one?" Kitty sighed. "I can go ahead and look."

Logan stopped and nodded, and she ran ahead. The doors were still open, but she went intangible anyways, a good safety precaution when you weren't sure what you were facing.

Doubly good, now that the emergency lights flickered and all the open doors suddenly disappeared. "What the fuck..?" John exclaimed.

"Taras could only keep 'em open for so long," Logan said. "Kitty's fine, she didn't need the doors. But if it's the central brain alerted to his betrayal, we could be in trouble."

Piotr came up beside him, one of his muscular arms starting to turn metal. "Suit up?" he asked.

He nodded. "Might as well. Hafta be ready for anything."

"I can take the wall," Zehra said, and he started to smell static electricity around her. Strands of her hair were already starting to float up.

"No, we're saving you. You're our ace in the hole. Nariko, can you burn us through?"

"No problem," she agreed, although he got a slight whiff of fear from her. Still, she didn't hesitate, putting her hands on the wall and tracing out a circle. It crumbled into dirt and fell to the floor at her feet. Logan, right behind her, peered inside and made sure everything was okay before they ventured forth. More empty rooms. Storage rooms? Maybe. No one would keep prisoners - especially mutant prisoners - so close to a power source. That was just asking to be blown up.

Kitty came running back through the next wall before Nariko could burn a hole in it. "Oh my god, it's so weird," she said, panting for breath. She must not have dared to become tangible anywhere in the interim. "It's like Frankenstein's lab crossed with a gay disco."

"Have you been to a gay disco?" John asked.

She shrugged. "I've seen Queer As Folk."

"Close enough," Logan said, ignoring the looks he was getting for obliquely admitting he'd been in a gay disco. Hey, when you were friends with Marc, you went to interesting places, not all of them abandoned military bases. Some were gay nightclubs full of shirtless go-go boys who obviously stuffed their mylar shorts and for some damn reason shaved their chests. But that was neither here nor there. "Take me there. I wanna see if what Taras told me was true. Shaheen, follow us."

"Got it," she said, then added, "Lesbian bars are more sedate."

"I know," he agreed. He'd been in one in Canada once. Accidentally; it took him about half a minute to realize he smelled nothing but women in the place, such an oddity for a bar he knew he'd stumbled into a sanctuary. But it wasn't crowded at that time, and the bartender didn't seem to care, so he had a beer and enjoyed the peace, kind of sorry he couldn't pick up any of the women but also okay with it, as it took the pressure off. He could see why straight women liked male gay bars. Again came the funny looks, although Shaheen just smirked at him, and although Kitty clearly wanted to ask, she just grabbed his arm and lead him through the wall.

They went through five more walls, taking a right turn before coming into a large room about the size of your average airplane hanger. Kitty let go of his arm, letting him become tangible so he could smell the air of the place. A good thing, as it was totally strange. "Can I ask why you've been in gay bars?" Kitty wondered, now tangible herself.

He shrugged. "It's always good to see how other people live."

She shook her head in disbelief. "Every time I'm sure I know you, something pops up that surprises me."

"If you never remember anything else I've taught ya, darlin', just remember this: predictability kills. Always mix it up, keep 'em guessing, keep alive." It was good advice, even though it didn't quite fit this context. Oh well, nothing was perfect.

He could see what Kitty meant about the room. There were different stratas of what he took to be emergency and auxiliary lighting on the walls and ceiling, some of it blue and some of it yellow, half of it steady and separate lights flickering due to power loss or simply age – there was no telling how long they'd been on. But it did make it look like there were flashing lights only missing a techno beat to keep time with.

The room itself was mostly concrete and metal, but none of it actually made sense. There were what looked like metal guide tracks in the wall, and random bits of metal embedded in concrete (hooks, loops, rectangular bits that could have part of junction boxes or any damn thing), and things so covered in dust they could have been machines or crates, buried beneath the detritus of age. Farther away, metal glinted under flickering lights, but it looked haphazard. Scrap? That was certainly the impression, but who would store scrap in a place like this? That didn't make sense, and it made him suspicious.

Recessed into shadows on a side of the walls where all the lights had died, he could see hulking shapes, smell dust fried by electricity. "You the "central brain"? It's time to pack it in, pal. Your world doesn't exist anymore."

As Logan started stomping towards the shadows, there was a metal noise, a sort of ratcheting, grinding screech and groan, like something rusting and mechanical firing up anyways. Two small red pin lights came on, and something lurched from the darkness into the inconstant light. It looked like a boxy suit of armor, only there was no way for anyone to have seen through the solid facemask, and Logan didn't smell anything Human. "Holy shit, it's Iron Man," Kitty gasped in shock.

"Yeah, well I'm adamantium, so I win." He popped his claws and was about to launch into a run, hoping that speed would make up for what he lost in bulk to the metal guy, but then twin laser bolts shot from its glowing red eye holes and burnt deep holes into the floor at his feet, making him stop. Oh yeah, that looked like it was gonna hurt.

"Robots?" She exclaimed in disbelief. "This place has killer robots too? All it needs is evil clowns, and we've seen everything."

"Maneuver number three, kid," he told her.

"Which – oh, crap. I hate that one."

The lasers were obviously powering up, so he said, "C'mon, move!" He barely felt her grab the back of his jacket before he started running, her right behind him, and when the robot (?) fired this time the laser passed harmlessly through them and burnt a couple more divots into the floor. He came to a dead stop in front of it and Kitty kept on running, going straight through him and diving into the robot. She disrupted enough circuitry to make it pause with a sort of labored hum, and as she came out the back of it, he sliced through what was probably its neck (its head was basically just balanced on its blocky shoulders; it looked like an early prototype of those bipedal robots they now had in Japan), and with his second set of claws sliced through its midsection, so the two pieces of it fell in opposite directions, leaving its legs standing alone.

"And that's how you kill a robot," he said, kicking the legs over. They hit the floor with a noise not unlike the door of a '72 Buick Skylark falling off the body. (Yes, he knew that sound specifically.)

Kitty was standing bent over, her hands on her knees, panting for breath. "I don't know why running through you makes me feel bad, but it does."

"Adamantium's toxic as all fuck."

"But it shouldn't effect me intangible, should it." Not a question.

He shrugged. It shouldn't, but he had no answer for her.

He scanned the shadows, searching for further surprises, and belatedly realized that he didn't actually smell the robot. Shouldn't he have? He smelled the same dust and ozone scent as before, the same smell of abandonment and disuse, but there should have been more. Nothing existed without smell; everything had an odor.

He turned back to the fallen machine to get a close up smell of it, and it wasn't there anymore. "It's gone," he noted. Why wasn't he surprised?

Kitty, who had been searching for other things now that she had straightened up, turned back and seemed even more surprised than before. "What? How the hell – you diced it like a chicken. Robots don't regenerate!" She paused. "Do they?"

"It's not real." There were still holes in the floor where the lasers had hit, proving the floor was solid and real, but beyond that he supposed everything else was up for grabs.

"What? Bullshit. I know I went through something real, all weird and mechanical and full of wires, and you know you sliced through something solid. Look, the burn holes are still there."

"It's real, but it's not real. Huh. I should have figured that out with Jeannie. But I guess Taras was augmenting it at the time, so I really didn't have a chance to think straight."

Kitty shook her head, staring at him in confusion. "Was that a Zen koan?"

"Oh, is that what's going on?" Shaheen said. Nariko had just melted a hole through the back wall, and now everyone else was coming through. "It's not working like the one back at the mansion."

It figured Shaheen would get where he was going with this. Sometimes he would swear she had a minor bit of telepathy she never told anyone about. "No, it doesn't. But I think the function's different. Back at the mansion it's for training. Here ... I think it's a prison. Or maybe a torture chamber. Both."

"What the fuck are you guys talking about?" John demanded.

Kitty finally got it. "The Danger Room. You're talking about the Danger Room, aren't you?"

Piotr, still all metaled out, seemed surprised. "Solid holography?"

He nodded. "Something got seriously fucked up here."

"Isn't that kind of technology super rare?" Nariko asked.

"Oh shit," John said suddenly. Logan thought maybe he saw a new threat, but he seemed to be turned inward, thinking of something. "Mags – Magneto – once said something like Charles's sacred technology wasn't so sacred anymore. He was talking to Mystique. She seemed to know what he was talking about, but when I asked he said it wasn't important. Could he have known about this? Is that why I saw him?"

"Charles?" Kitty repeated.

He shrugged a single shoulder, somewhat dismissive. "He always called Xavier Charles. Kinda gay, if you ask me."

"But where does the whole severed head thing come into all of this?" Nariko continued. "Why were we being fed fears and stuff?"

"It's crazy," Zehra said.

Piotr was still looking at John, stuck on what he said. "Did Magneto sell the technology to someone else? You were going to tell us this when, John?"

But Shaheen pointed to Zehra, and said to Logan, "I bet she's right, you know. The system's nuts."

Now everybody was staring at Shaheen with varying degrees of disbelief. "Machines can't go crazy," John snapped. "They can malfunction, but they can't be nuts."

"Says who?" Logan countered. The more he considered it, the more it seemed possible. "The more sophisticated the AI, the more that can go wrong with it. And wouldn't chaos meet the definition of insanity? At least for a program."

John seemed surprised. "We're really considering this? Crazy machines."

"With some Human help," Logan admitted. "The Human attached to the system – Taras – is completely out of his mind. Maybe one influenced the other." Something related to PsyOps? Maybe this was the Russian equivalent, augmented by technology. If so, something went horribly, horribly wrong.

"So what's the central brain?" Kitty wondered. "Is it a crazy program or a crazy person?"

As if that invocation was enough to bring them their answer, there was a huge rumbling noise that shook the floor and obliterated any further conversation. Logan turned to see the gay Frankenstein's abandoned disco was gone, replaced by a vista of snow only occasionally marred by a burst of static that caused the image to fade in spots, revealing concrete floors and walls. Shadows emerged grey in the distance, slowly becoming military tanks with huge forward cannons. "We can die here, can't we?" John asked, mostly curious.

"I already have," Logan said. Or so he thought. Maybe he hadn't; maybe he just had a near death experience. No matter; it was a safe assumption the program had no limits. Maybe it even thought it was defending itself, like Taras thought he was. "Piotr, with me." Piotr obeyed, and they stood shoulder to shoulder in front of everyone else, a literal Human shield. He wasn't all metal like Piotr, but he was the most expendable, so that counted for something. "Kitty, maneuver one."

"Oh god, this has been a horrible day," she said, but Logan knew she would obey. It was simply her grabbing the arms of John and Nariko, ready to go intangible at a millisecond's notice. Shaheen grabbed Nariko's arm and reached out to Zehra, but she slipped away and stepped in front of Logan and Piotr, walking out towards the tanks.

"Is that all you've got?" she sneered, the ozone scent rising as her hair started to frizz with static electricity.

Sheheen put her hand on Logan's shoulder, guaranteeing he'd go intangible if the rest of them did. "Why do I have a feeling this is going to be ugly?" she whispered.

"'Cause it is gonna be ugly," he replied, as the first cannon boomed.


	12. Chapter 12

12

The smell of ozone was pretty much the only giveaway that Zehra was turning on the juice, until the destruction began.

As the launched missile came screaming towards them, Zehra just waved her hand and it seemed to turn in mid-air, as supple as a fish swimming under water, and boomeranged right back towards the tank that had fired it. The explosion was massive, and the tank was vaporized, with bits of shrapnel being the only proof that it had once existed.

The other tanks made grinding noises as they seemed to stop against their will, and Logan saw an opportunity to lighten Zehra's psychic load. "Okay everybody, free for all," he said. "Attack at will." There was no real people in them, so there was no reason everybody couldn't go nuts.

Logan popped his claws and ran for the closest tank, swiping at the cannon and lopping off part of the barrel. His instinct was to jump up on top and heave open the hatch, crashing in on the men inside, but there were no men inside, and if there were, they were nothing but illusions. Not worth the time. He also had to resist the urge to slice the treads, which would keep the tank from going anywhere, but they weren't going anywhere anyways.

Kitty ran through a tank and disappeared, and then the tank began to sink, as if in quicksand. Kitty pulled the tank down (because, intangible, it weighed no more than she did, which is to say not at all) until its treads were just barely visible about the ground, and she rose out of the snow beside it. Piotr grabbed the barrel of the buried tank's cannon and proceeded to bend it, making the metal screech as he bent the turret into a useless Allen wrench kind of shape.

Nariko used her power on another tank, melting a hole in it so John could blast the inside with fire, melting wires and burning up anyone who was stuck in it. "From tank to toaster oven," he shouted mockingly.

Logan cut the other tank, sending metal flying, and John just started to light the other tanks up, probably because he was bored. Now they were flaming wreckage, useless hunks of scrap that could have passed for a modern art installation. How long had that taken them? Under five minutes, definitely. Awesome. He now had a guarantee his team could destroy tanks in record time. He wanted to see Storm top that.

The ground started to shake in deep, thunderous booms, so hard and deep that Logan stumbled, and Kitty actually fell on her ass. (She was tangible, so she didn't disappear through the snow.) Far on the horizon, shrouded by mist and clouds, was something huge. Massively huge. Godzilla sized.

Right now it was a dark, vague shape the size of a skyscraper, but it had a some dark lines shooting off from it, but when they moved, they seemed to be not lines but tentacles. What the hell ..?

"It's unleashing Monster Island on us?" Kitty asked, as Logan helped her back up to her feet.

He shrugged. "The tanks weren't much of a hardship. It's gotta do something."

"Let's shut this down," Shaheen said to Zehra, staring at the side of her face. Shaheen had that look of intense concentration on her face, the one that usually meant that she was using her power boost, and Logan felt his stomach twist in anxiety as he realized she was boosting Zehra. That just didn't sound good.

"Everybody, back off!" he ordered, having no idea if Zehra could control her powers amped up. She could barely control them at normal strength at the best of times. He didn't need to say it twice.

The deep thuds continued, but there was a sudden noise, a huge crack, like a glacier shearing off the face of an ice shelf, and the illusion disappeared with a boom as great and deep as any of the previous tremors. In fact it was louder; Logan felt a sharp pain in his head as at least one of his eardrums popped, and he stumbled as the lights went out and he could feel a wave of what could only have been energy turning metal to shrapnel.

The snow and the ominous silhouette gave way to a grey, almost warehouse style roof and wall, which now had a huge hole in it, big enough to taxi an aircraft through, although what detritus that was around was little bigger than picnic refuse (it wasn't so much knocked through than vaporized). Logan could feel cold air coming out of it, as well as smell the crisp, familiar scent of snow. The hole revealed nothing but blackness that soon resolved into a dark outer wall that brought to mind a type of emergency bulkhead or perhaps old radiation shielding. It wasn't quite impervious to Siberian winters.

"Stop already," Zehra said, grabbing her head. She still smelled strongly of static.

Shaheen rubbed her eyes as she turned away. "I have."

"Somebody knock me out," Zehra said. "I'm gonna lose it."

"No you're not," Shaheen insisted in her calm, all knowing doctor voice. "Rein it back. You're in control."

Positive reinforcement didn't seem to be working. "No I'm not! I'm losing it!" Static electricity crackled like distance hail pelting metal, and the ozone scent was almost overwhelming.

Piotr looked over at Logan helplessly, as if asking tacitly if he should knock her out, if he even could (did Piotr have that kind of temperament? He didn't seem to ...) but Shaheen made it a moot point. She sighed heavily, as if Zehra had disappointed her, and pulled out what looked like an epi-pen, which were usually full of epinephrine for allergic reactions. But it must not have been, as Shaheen jabbed Zehra in the neck with it, and after a couple of seconds, she swayed on her feet and collapsed, but Shaheen caught her before she hit the ground.

"What's that?" Kitty asked, as Logan went over and took the unconscious Zehra from Shaheen.

"Ativan, an anti-convulsant drug sometimes used on people who just freak out beyond all reason. I thought I should carry some in case Zehra had a seizure."

"Good call," Logan said.

"I'm freezing my balls off," John complained, hugging himself for warmth. "Does this mean we finally found a way out of here?"

"I'd think so." There was no crates around, no lights; it was a large empty room. Not only was the illusion gone, but Logan was fairly certain that the Central Brain got vaporized along with the back wall. Looking back, the doors were now visible again. In fact, Nariko had melted one, and only the bottom half was visible. "Kitty, go scout ahead, see where the closest exit point is. Piotr, come take Zehra, I have to go back to Taras."

Piotr remained metal – maybe because he wasn't sure the danger was over, maybe because it was to keep from getting cold – but he took Zehra and looked at him with suspicion. "You gonna rescue him?"

"I'm fulfilling my obligation," he told him honestly. It told him nothing, but hey, they could argue about that later.

He took off down the empty rooms, following the trail back towards the crazy head room, and wondered why he felt a little sick about it. Why, he didn't know. He wouldn't want to live as a head in a box.

Once he got back to the room, he knocked on the coffin/prison, and said, in Russian, "I think you know we did it. You want to change your mind?"

Just like that he was snapped back into Taras's mindscape, which was now nothing but a barren office with a single broken down desk chair. He was looking out the soaped up, dirty window, his back to him. "I didn't think you'd come back."

"We made a deal."

"Yes, but you're Weapon X. You're my enemy."

"I don't make promises I don't intend to keep."

"The noble savage. Quaint. It's nice to know someone keeps their word."

Was he trying to be insulting so doing this would be easier? "Look, I know a guy with a nearly unlimited power set. If anybody could get you a body again, or some equivalent, it's gonna be him."

Taras turned and gave him a curious look. "Did you just think he's a god? You did!"

"His powers are god like," he replied, aware that Bob could never be explained away like that, not if you actually knew all that he had done. He was still a bit shocked that the Organization actually tried to explain him away that easily, but at least they had the modicum of sense to list him as untouchable and to be avoided at all costs. "He might be able to help."

Taras shook his head. "I should be dead. I am kinda dead. Your teek totally killed the power supply, so I'll be dead fairly soon anyways. How powerful is that girl? How is her brain not leaking out her ears?"

"Well, that's a good question. It sort of is."

"Do her a favor and kill her before she gets as bad as me."

"We're trying to help her. Killing isn't the only option."

"Wow. What happened to you, Weapon X?"

"The name's Logan, and I'm not an assassin anymore."

He smiled in a bitter, crooked way. "Once an assassin, always an assassin. Blood doesn't wash that easily. Believe me, I know. Oh, speaking of which, there are some people in cold storage. Some of your people might be there, I don't know, the Central Brain must have done that. I never archived anyone."

"Why did it do that?"

He shrugged. "So there was always people? I've no idea. And thanks for the offer, but no thanks."

Just like that, Logan was back in his body, sprawled on the cold floor. The temperature was dropping rapidly; Zehra must have taken out the back up power, like Taras claimed. Surely Shaheen's power boost must have helped, but the fact that she'd almost achieved a Phoenix like telekinetic display was unsettling. Even more unsettling was the fact that any more like that would probably kill her. What were they going to do with her? Well, at least he could guarantee she wouldn't end up a head in a box – obviously she had no healing factor.

He popped his claws and drove them through the adamantium lined coffin with difficulty, finally punching through and pulling across, hitting the wires first. The second time, he knew he hit flesh, and he kept hitting flesh until blood and pulped tissue slicked his claws. Once your brains got diced, that was pretty much it for you, or so he'd always hoped. It's why he told Marcus if he ever went back over to the other side, if he ever went nuts or got seriously mindfucked, he was to shoot him in the eye with a specialty bullet: maybe adamantium, but "cop killer" or even your standard hollow point would do it. Puree his brains, and he would probably be dead for good. He'd only told Marcus because he was the only man he trusted to know when it was time to pull the trigger and able to take the shot.

Or, again, so he hoped. Even if he was left a brain dead vegetable, at least he couldn't be out there hurting anyone. He and Zehra did have that in common, they were both time bombs, but her trigger was easier to get to.

Taras had dumped the location of "cold storage" into his brain, so he knew where it was and set off, but he caught a familiar scent and paused. "Why aren't you with the kids?"

"Piotr and I picked and rendezvous point, and I left them with him. They're gonna listen to the big Russian guy in Russia, trust me," Shaheen said, coming through the doorway, hunched into her coat. Logan had already started adapting to the cold. "He wanted you to kill him, didn't he?"

"Would you want to live as a head in a box?"

She shook her head. "I could have offered an Ativan overdose, but hey, healing factor. Wouldn't have worked. Besides, does he – did he have blood circulation?"

Logan shrugged helplessly. "No clue. He wasn't sure how he was surviving either. But c'mon, you can help me. There's some people who might still be alive in a sub-level. Maybe you can help me tell."

"The people we were looking for?"

"Maybe. He didn't know."

She followed him, trusting him to know the way, and they'd traveled what seemed like a half a mile of corridors before she said, "You know, this has been the weirdest and fucking scariest thing I've ever done in my entire life, and I grew up in Algeria."

"Sorry." He'd had worse, but that was probably patently obvious to everyone by now.

"What? No. It was fucking great man. I'm really going to enjoy playing Bones to your Kirk."

"Oh god, do I hafta be Kirk?"

"Damn it, Logan, I'm a Doctor, not a casting director."

He shook his head and smirked, trying not to laugh. Maybe there was hope for all of them yet.

* * *

Logan found the plane easily.

Once his nose adapted to the sharp scent of snow and earth, it was easy to make out the faint traces of oil and polymers that exuded from the jet. The only problem was it was night going on to the grey-blue half light of early dawn, and the cold, which had been unbelievable before, had moved on to impossible. He couldn't even break the crust of the ice with his footsteps; it wasn't so much like concrete than marble now, something too hard to crumble.

He got the kids back before any of them suffered any permanent effects from the cold, but it was pretty close. He had to tell Storm the X gear could take cold and very cold, but Siberia cold was where it all started to fail. At least John got everyone warmed up pretty quickly, finally proving useful.

They were going to have to fly back to rescue the people, three of which were the group they were looking for, and two others who were probably villagers or maybe hunters who stumbled into the wrong patch of Siberian wilderness. They had been in some form of stasis that was now failing due to the fact that the power was dead, and moving them wasn't going to be easy, although Piotr in metal form could lift a lot (which was helpful). Shaheen thought they may need medical attention, though, so the decision was made to fly to Omsk and get them help there. Logan and Piotr decided they were going to try and come off as members of some secret government unit so no questions would be asked. (Piotr didn't know if he could actually do it, so Logan told him to leave all the bluffing up to him; Pete was just going to stand behind him looking mean and inscrutable, which he could do. He was to say nothing but yes or no and never look anyone in the eye, just to further puzzle and intimidate people. This led Piotr to asking him how often he'd done something like this, which Logan could only shrug at, but he got a sense he'd done it enough to know just what would push people's buttons and unsettle them.)

Once at the hospital, after convincing the staff that it was best not to ask any questions of the freaky dude and his overly muscled companion, he contacted Storm and let her know how it all went. She listened without comment, and then asked, "Is this a joke?"

"No. That's what happened."

"A psychic head in a box?"

"It's a weird world."

"What the hell was it? I mean the ... maze."

"Calling me – Weapon X – his enemy tipped the game. It was obviously some kind of training base built by the Russian version of the Organization. But the AI became way too sophisticated, and then they bio-grafted it into Taras, adding up to complete madness. The machine knew its priority, which was to train soldiers, so when it ran out of soldiers – presumably they escaped or most likely died in training sims that had become too real – it made sure to use its technology to get them. I think there was some kind of rudimentary teleportation system, although the energy used must have been immense, and it seemed to knock people out in the course of transport. There's a lot of impressive technology there, much worth stealing."

"So why didn't the Russians shut it down?"

"They couldn't. The problem was the technology was so impressive, and the psychic and the AI both so fucking nuts it stopped taking outside orders. The only way in was to get captured."

"And to be captured was to die."

"Exactly. Although the Central Brain started putting some people into storage, probably because getting genuine people was harder and harder. This is the middle of fucking nowhere, which was probably why the Russian authorities were content to just leave it running. As long as they stayed away from the area, none of them would be hurt."

"They let innocent people get killed. That's unconscionable."

"Yeah, but think of it as the Org with Russian accents, and you get it. Collateral damage; of no concern, and a statistical inevitability."

She made a noise of disgust. He was sitting in the jet's cockpit, all alone since he let the kids go out to a nearby market, with Shaheen playing chaperon. Piotr was still at the hospital, glowering silently at staff who got jumpy around him and had no problem believing he was some kind of government thug. "So the psychic energy surge?"

"Probably Taras, possibly fighting off another telekinetic. I got the sense he fought one recently, although nowhere near as strong as Zehra, whom he admitted was in a different level. When Shaheen boosted her, we were luckily she didn't take out the entire base."

"Is she all right?"

"She's still sleeping off the Ativan. Shaheen says we hafta give her a couple more hours."

"What do you think? Is she trainable?"

"She's gotta 'tude, but she was key here. The problem is her seizures. She's powerful, but I really think that's going to kill her before she ever gets it totally under control."

She sighed heavily. "That's what I'm afraid of. Should we try and pull her off the line?"

"Does that stop her from using her powers?"

"No."

"Okay. So ... where does that leave us?"

"Hell if I know, Logan. Do you think you can reach her?"

He considered that as he looked out the windscreen at the city beyond the airstrip. A glassy grey glimpse of the water was just visible at the horizon. "I have a shot. Will I accomplish it? No idea. But I'm willing to keep trying."

It was still weird to be the leader of his own team, especially since he had two known troublemakers – John and Zehra – on it. But you know, it wasn't that bad; it was a lot better than he thought it would be.

Oh god – maybe he really was getting old.

* * *

The End


End file.
